Sky Down
by Bainaku
Summary: The story of an almost-prince, her princess, and the evolution of their relationship during the Silver Millennium.  Haruka/Michiru.  Chapter Four added 11/28!  Please r/r!
1. Chapter One:  KeroKero

**Warning: **This story implies the eventual involvement of two women together. Don't like? Don't read.

**Commentary: **I owe my gratitude yet again to **lostinhersong**, who read bits of this for me and gave me invaluable advice and encouragement. Because she hasn't seen this in its entirety, though, blame any mistakes you see on me! ;)

This is the beginning of a story involving Haruka, Michiru, and their relationship as it evolved during the Silver Millennium. They are between six and eight years old here—you decide the specifics!

I originally didn't intend this story to be even this long, so its eventual breadth is unknown. If you like it enough to see it persist, the best way to have that happen is to let me know!

To all of you who read, review, message, question, critique, and encourage me: thank you so much. Please continue to do so.

As always, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

**Disclaimer: **I do not own the BSSM franchise. It belongs to the goddess Takeuchi Naoko.

* * *

_Oh empty my heart  
I've got to make room for this feeling  
So much bigger than me_

—Imogen Heap, "Can't Take It In"

**SKY DOWN**

**CHAPTER ONE: Kero-Kero**

The reeds rustled. A child peered through their slats, her gaze predatory, her fingers buried in the brookbed's muck. It gooshed up over her knuckles and painted them brown. When her hair fell into her eyes, she brushed it away and gave her sharp cheek a thoughtless sienna warstripe. A dragonfly buzzed the shell of her ear; a cloud of midges passed by her nose, and sweat misted in her lashes and ran down the runnel of her shoulderblades. Heedless of it all, her world the width of a pencil and her eyes fixed upon her target, the child tensed. Her thighs trembled. She licked her lips.

She sprang!

Her fingers closed about the unsuspecting frog. With a strangled _gweep _and a slippery writhe, it squirted from the cage of her hands, landed in the sodden rushes, and made haste away in a flex of long legs and a flurry of swirled streambed silt. The croaking cacophony of its brethren filled the reeds with ribbety reprimand, and the young princess in their midst threw back her head and laughed.

"Fine!" she shrieked, cupping her muddy hands about her mouth to form a rudimentary bullhorn. She sucked in a sure breath. Her cheeks puffed. She insisted finally in a giggle-gasp wail: "I won't kiss _any of you_!"

"Who are you talking to?"

The princess spun on a surprised heel. The mire beneath her feet squelched, slipped, gave way. She managed a single pinwheel of flailing arms before she ended on her rump in the middle of the stream. The trailing ends of her dress fluttered on the faint currents; slimemuck specked her slender legs and spurted up the back of her ceremonial vest. The frog chorus fell in volume to what seemed a shared sinister laugh.

"Ugh," she muttered, cheeks flushed, and turned her eyes to the stream's low bank.

Another child in a linen shirt and breeches crouched there, watching her. Elbows propped on thighs, hands dangling between knees, said child flicked her fingers and repeated, curious, "Who are you talking to?"

"I _was _talking to the frogs," the princess sighed. She noted a sliver of gooey green at the edge of her vision and, wincing, reached up to pull a clump of sodden moss from her hair.

"Why?" her visitor pursued. She smirked and tacked on, "You missed some." She twiddled her fingertips above her own sandy temple. "Just here."

Squelching to her feet, the princess slogged over to the bank and plunked herself down mere inches from the newcomer, who wrinkled her nose. "I," she told the girl imperiously as she made to wring out her soaked curls, "was looking for a prince in them." She paused, shifted her legs under the drenched dress. She offered next, morose, "I think I have mud in my—"

"What have frogs got to do with princes?" her unexpected companion interrupted. She shifted over a little to avoid the streamwater spatter and sat down. Smirk still hovering about her mouth, she pointed out, "You've still got that stuff in your hair."

The princess blinked, then ladled the sopping mass of her mane into her companion's lap and insisted, "Get it out for me, then."

"…you just dripped slime," the stranger observed, her tone a mix of horrified and awed, "all _over _me."

The princess flapped a pale hand. "You won't get in trouble," she assured the girl. "I'll just tell them I pushed you in."

"But—"

"It's your fault, too." Looking up, the princess narrowed seabrine eyes and threatened, "I fell because you surprised me. If you don't get it out, I'll tell them _you _pushed _me _in."

"That's not fair!" the stranger protested.

"Neither is holding my head like this," the princess groaned. "My neck hurts. Hurry up! You already know what will happen if you don't."

"And if I _do_?" the other child muttered. She eyed the goop in the young royal's hair—and on her breeches—with disgusted apprehension. "You have to give me a better deal than not tattling."

The princess sat up a little. Her wet-welch locks whispered over the stranger's wrists, traced her arms. She looked resolutely through the snared snarl of her bangs and whispered to the girl, voice hushed with promise, "I'll tell you what frogs and princes have in common."

The newcomer frowned, dubious. Doubt fogged her gaze and made it gray, but there was green in there too, the sprig-hope of mountain meadows. She huffed and asked, "Is it good?"

"Oh," said the princess, smug, "it's good."

The stranger debated, jiggling her knees beneath the royal's turquoise head. Around the pair the frogs kept up their churring chitter. One gave a particularly disgruntled _werk! _from the safety of the ring-rushes. A small, curious smile stole over the stranger's lips at that, and she plunged her fingers into the soggy blue mound, searching diligently for lingering algae strands. She demanded then, eager in the subdued way of one who is more accustomed to being quiet than lending a voice to light, "Tell me."

The princess held up a pruny, muck-muddled finger. "First things first!"

"What _now_?" moaned the stranger. She nevertheless stuck to her task, not that she was given much choice in the matter: the princess had hair like enthusiastic ivy, and it clung with special surety when wet.

"Your name," the noble asserted. "What is it?"

The stranger hesitated, netted by the noose of hair in her lap. "Haruka," she offered at last. She worried a careful palm over a final cerulean curl, tossed a glop of residual stream-gunk back into the nearby reeds, and surmised, "Finished."

The princess rocked upright. She ran studious, suspicious fingers over her skull, then smiled and thrust an arm into the space between them. She did her best to curtsy sitting down. "Michiru," she permitted. She lowered her lashes and looked at her cohort through them, feigning shyness. "Sorry for getting your hands dirty."

"And my lap too?"

"No," Michiru admitted in a brazen giggle. "White breeches? You were asking for it!"

"They aren't white anymore," Haruka muttered. She picked a crumpled dragonfly wing from amidst a coil of unidentifiable gloop near the hinge of her knee, flicked it away, and turned burnished stormcloud eyes to the princess at her hip. "You owe me!" she insisted suddenly. "The princes, the frogs—pay up!"

Michiru made a face, but agreed, "All right, all right." Tucking her chin into the cradle of her hands, she asked the other girl, "Do you know what a prince is?"

"What my father wishes I was," replied the wearer of stained breeches. She blew a sandspire forelock from her eyes and shrugged.

The young royal's face pinched in revulsion. "Gross," she opined, and continued sagely, "a prince is a _man_."

"Uh-huh."

"He wants you to—to be a _man_?"

Haruka hesitated. She rubbed smudged knuckles over her jaw and hedged, "I think it's something different." At Michiru's squally glance, she held up her hands in a peace-slay-me gesture and grinned. "Okay, fine! So a prince is a man."

"A man," the princess echoed grumpily. She eyed her companion, daring the advent of any new definitions. When none came, she persisted, "A man who will do _anything _you want."

Haruka chewed the inside of a cheek, listening to both her company and the _nyeep-nyeep _of the rushbed's inhabitants. She narrowed her eyes against the glare from the stream's sunlight-spangled surface. "Ah-huh…"

"And _frogs_," Michiru conferred, "turn into princes when princesses kiss them."

Together they considered this. The royal dangled her feet in the stream and dug her toes into the soft silt, relishing the squish of the mud beneath her heels. The newcomer, for her part, watched the rill-rustle of the reeds and squinted one eye shut for the speckle of sweat above it. She heaved a knowing, suspecting sigh.

"You want one, don't you?" she asked. "A prince."

"Absolutely," Michiru affirmed. She kicked a leg and sent a ring of water skyward, expression righteous at the height it achieved. Nibbling her lip, she stated, "They're really hard to catch, though."

"…I could help you catch one," Haruka proposed. She steepled her fingers above a grubby knee and smirked at the noble. "But I will not," she declared, "kiss one for you."

"Who said I needed you to kiss one for me?" Michiru demanded archly.

"You did. You said—you said frogs turn into princes when _princesses _kiss them." Haruka jerked a thumb at herself, the pad of the digit tucked between the dimple of her collarbones. She smiled. With her other hand, she indicated her entire person in a grand, sweeping flourish. "I happen to be a princess."

"You happen to be a liar!" Michiru snickered at her.

Haruka bristled. "I am _not_! I'm a princess! Really!"

"Of what?" Michiru indulged. She kicked both feet this time. The resounding splash scared off a small school of fish, and beneath the new ripples they flicked and shone like silver darts. Michiru laughed.

"Of a whole _planet_," Haruka boasted. She plucked a blade of grass, stuck it between her lips, and nipped at it. It tasted terrible but, in an effort to exude poise, she kept up the act. "Of Uranus," she maintained. "I'm here to meet _another _princess, actually. Maybe if I could find her, _she'd _kiss a frog for you."

Michiru's feet stilled. Waterbugs skated placidly between the canyons of her ankles. "Which princess?" she asked, suddenly cautious.

"Are there really so many?" Haruka replied. Puzzlement laced her voice in lieu of her companion's reaction, drew it down soft again.

"No… no. I guess not. But—" she floundered, and found, "which one?"

"The princess of Neptune," Haruka murmured. She spat out her blade of grass at last, unable to bear the taste any longer. "The two of us—we're supposed to—"

"Form a team," Michiru permitted. She drew one foot from the stream, then the other, and dried them on the grass. She looked away from Haruka into the reeds. Somewhere in their hidden heart, a frog gave a weeble-wick croak.

"Yeah," Haruka concurred. She rocked onto her knees, brows blown aloft. "You're her, huh?"

Michiru looked back at her, stuck out her tongue: nodded.

They surveyed each other. Haruka spied a pondscum urchin. Michiru noted a blonde, blade-bent child possessed of strict eyes and a surreptitiously softer smile beneath them. They both secretly liked what they saw.

The latter hid a grin behind a grimy hand and observed, "You don't think I'm a liar?"

Haruka rolled her shoulders. One cracked. "No. I think you'd be bad at it anyway." She prodded the other royal's hip. "You didn't show up earlier at the welcome ceremony. Why not? We all waited a long time."

Michiru stared hard at her fellow noble a moment, face unreadable. She scratched an insect bite on her thigh and ultimately confessed, "I was afraid I wouldn't like you."

"Uh?" Haruka coaxed.

"We're supposed to form a team. Us two. I mean, there are others, right—other princesses we'll work with someday." Michiru looked to the other girl for confirmation.

Haruka dipped her head in easy assent. "Yeah, that's what my father says. We might have to fight, too. With those girls." She added, "But only if it gets really bad."

"Otherwise it will just be us," Michiru confirmed. She scratched the bite again, harder this time. The frogs set up an orchestral number fit to rival the Triton citadel's best performance, and minnows zoomed in the shadows cast by the aqua-haired noble's toes. She took a breath and grouched, "Wouldn't it be terrible if I didn't like you?"

"Well—"

"It would be!" interrupted the princess. She scowled, not so much at Haruka as through her. The other girl had to bite her lips on the inside to keep from laughing. "Together forever and hating each other! Geez!"

"Mm…" Abandoning all pretense of caring whether she was clean, Haruka dropped herself onto an elbow along the streambank. She stretched her legs over the moss-covered verge. Crinkled leaves collected in the cuffs of her breeches. "So you ran away," she discerned.

Michiru picked up a rush seedpod and worked her fingernails into its crevices. She attempted to break it apart, failed, and chucked it resolutely across the currents instead. "I ran," she said, and amended, "but not away."

"I'm trying to understand you," Haruka responded, "but it's not working. You're being weird."

Michiru, whose absent wandering fingers had found another seedpod, pursed her lips and chucked her prize at the other princess. It bonked between blazing cowlicks.

"Hey!"

"I am _not _being weird," Michiru sniffed. She folded her arms. Rivulets of muddy water dripped from her wrists.

"Weee-eeeeird," Haruka insisted, sing-song. She was treated to the sight of Michiru's pink-petal tongue for the second time in mere minutes.

"I ran," the smaller princess repeated after a patient pause.

"Uh-_huuuh_…"

"I can find something heavier to throw! I have _great _aim."

"Fine, fine! You ran! And?"

"And it wasn't away," huffed Michiru, "because I—I guess I sort of knew you'd find me no matter what, or where I went. Not just because we have to do this, either." She trailed off to study the minnows in the stream, head bobbing to the wind-crackle of the circling cattails. Privately she sought words to explain a feeling she scarcely understood but implicitly trusted, ignorant still of such broad concepts as fate and destiny and starcrossed streams in which were spun greater things than slippery frogs.

Haruka sensed the necessity of quiet, so she kept it. Resting her cheek in her palm, she put in a simple, "I'm listening," and waited.

Michiru smiled. Thus assured, she volunteered matter-of-factly, "The sun comes up in the morning because it—because it _does_. Nothing anyone says makes it do it. And that's how I felt when they told me about you coming here, to be, uhm. To be with me. Our team. I just... ergh!" Her fingers twisted together in her lap and she spluttered, "I knew you would find me because—because that's _you_. Like the sun comes up, you'd come to me." She made a cutting motion with her hand. "That's all," she finished, and fell silent.

Haruka mulled this over. A beetle made to lumber across her knuckles: she flexed them and let it pass unmolested. "Fair enough," she allowed when it was gone.

The other princess laughed. "Just like that?"

"Hm?"

"You agree with what I said? Just like that?"

"Why not?" The blonde child grunted, sat up. Both her breeches and her tunic bristled with bits of fen detritus. "I'm here, aren't I?"

Michiru's smile fanned into a sugar-shy grin. "Mmhm. You are."

"I still don't understand why I'm _here_, though. Exactly." Haruka motioned to the stream: its reeds, rushes, cattails, croaking creatures.

Roses wore across Michiru's cheeks. "I like it here," she defended. "I—I wanted to be in a place I liked. In case I didn't like you."

"Huh," observed the newcomer. And then, "Do you? Like me?"

They surveyed each other again, thoughtful and certain at once. Michiru bit her lip, sighed, hedged: "That depends."

"Ah?"

"…will you really help me catch a frog?"

Haruka's thin ribs jumped in a blustery sigh, but she swung to her feet and offered her arm to Michiru. Pleased, the princess pulled herself up. Her companion told her with a wiggle of yellow brows, "I'll show you my skills."

"My hero," Michiru lauded the girl, though the praise was half a giggle. She fluttered her eyelashes and tightened her fingers in the available elbow.

They set off along the streambank's narrow skirt, leaving behind them a stippled line of seeping footprints. The encompassing hum of insects lent their progress a warbly soundtrack. Heat-rills simmered over stiller pockets of water, and both princesses were sweating profusely by the time Haruka spotted a satisfactory clump of undisturbed rushes. She drew up short and pointed at it, indicating it to Michiru. When the smaller girl made to pounce from the bank into the stagnant mire, Haruka captured her hand and insisted, "No! We need a plan first."

"Plan?" Michiru asked impatiently.

"A strategy." Haruka tugged the noble's fingers. "If just chasing them around worked, I think you'd have gotten one by now." She frowned suddenly. "Hey—why do you even _want_ a prince, anyway?"

Michiru gave her friend a surprised look. "Didn't you hear what I said earlier? About how princes are men who will do anything you want?"

"I heard you just fine. You're kind of loud."

Ignoring the jibe, Michiru queried, "Don't you have some chores you absolutely, positively hate?"

"Sure, I gue—"

"Chores you wish someone else would do _for _you?"

A dragonfly landed on Haruka's forefront cowlick, buzzed its wings, and took off again. Eyes wide in abrupt understanding, she jiggled Michiru's hand in hers and hissed, "We need a plan _now_. And _two _frogs."

"Well, you're the one with skills, right?" Beaming, Michiru jabbed a thumb at the waiting rushes. "What do you suggest?"

The blonde princess took a moment to seriously study the situation. Her lips moved soundlessly; her fingers drummed against Michiru's palm, idle, a low backbeat to a burgeoning friendship. She soon recommended, "Since you're good at scaring them, you do that. On the other side. I'll wait over here and surprise them when they come out."

"They're really slimy," Michiru cautioned her, doubtful. "Do you think you can catch one and keep it?" She hesitated, then chewed her lip and admitted, "I lost one right before you got here. Splut!" She wiggled her fingertips, miming the scurry of a scared streamslicker.

Smiling because really, who could help it around the spritely girl, Haruka unhooked their joined fingers only to press them together again, flat this time. "Look," she said, and Michiru did. "I thought of that already, see? My hands are bigger than yours. So I think it'll work."

Her eyes fixed on the press of their palms, the azure-locked child managed in a tone that bordered on worshipping, "You really do have skills, don't you?"

Haruka blinked. Blood boiled into her face and she put in, voice both firm and faint, "Let's try it and find out." She took her hand away from Michiru's and sat down on the bank, gaze hidden, fingers working at the laces of her boots.

Michiru hopped from foot to foot as the other girl carefully took off her socks and rolled up her breeches too. "I'm going over!" she announced once Haruka was ready.

"Ssh!"

"Sorry, sorry! I'm going _over_," she repeated in a strident stage whisper, "now." She turned, slipped, nearly fell face first into the stream, and shot a shamed look back at Haruka. The other princess, lips stapled smartly shut, aimed her eyes skyward and pretended to have seen nothing.

Arms spread for balance, Michiru waded across the stream and crept to the back of the rushbed. Haruka followed her partway and crouched before the still reeds, letting her fingertips trace the surface of the water, each digit flared in ready anticipation. The weight of the humid air fell over the girls in a leaden sheet—sweat dipped from the tip of Haruka's nose and Michiru's vest stuck to her in all the wrong places, but neither of them really minded. Hunting frog-princes was, after all, incredibly serious business.

"I'm in position," Michiru eventually informed her. Her words came in a low, rare rasp.

"Me too," Haruka called quietly back. Her eyes narrowed, focused, intent. "Do it."

A shriek shook the calm of the glen as Michiru threw herself into the rushes. Cattails crackled, crumbled; reeds exploded in a rapidfire popgun salute. Loose sludge flew to the heavens and Haruka, half-snarling and half-laughing, launched her slender body like an arrow into the mire after the first frog she saw. She grasped—

Her fingers closed over it—

"HAH!" Michiru cried seconds later. She came out of the ruined reeds with fresh algae in her hair, mud stuffed up a nostril, and a stunned minnow wedged behind an ear, but she noticed none of these things. Her attention in its entirety fell instead on the struggling creature clutched in Haruka's hands. "You _got _one!" she exulted. Giddy in the surge of endorphins that came with such a triumph, she sat down in the shallows next to her friend.

"I did!" Haruka wheezed. She pulled her face from a mound of muck, spat, and made to sit up. Michiru helped her. With the fringe of her dress, she wiped away the ooze on the other girl's face, and when Haruka could see again, they both bent over their prize to examine it.

Bowed front legs paddling uselessly at the air above Haruka's thumbs, the anxious amphibian squirmed in its prison of palms. Its tremendous jowls quivered. Its squinty eyes strained; its throat bulged. It kicked a webbed foot that made a wet _thwuck _against its captor's wrist.

"It's _huge_," Michiru breathed.

"It's _ugly_," Haruka decided. "It's gonna make a really unfortunate prince." She thrust it at Michiru, who giggled and leaned away. "Go on, then," she encouraged the smaller princess. "A nice big smack. Right on his chops! C'mon!"

Puckering her lips obediently, the child dropped her head to bestow her embrace upon the frog. With her mouth millimeters from its snout, however, she stopped. She frowned.

"What's wrong?" Haruka asked. She gave the frog a ginger joggle. "You shouldn't keep him waiting. It's rude, see."

"How… how do you know it's a him?" Michiru queried.

Haruka opened her mouth, paused—closed it again. "I don't," she confessed.

"I don't know how to tell either," Michiru worried. She leaned in close and Haruka followed suit, and their temples brushed, a muddled wave to a dirty dune, as they set about inspecting their captive from top to trembling toe.

"Do you know if it works on girl frogs?" Haruka murmured.

"Hmm-mm." The princess lifted her eyes to her friend, expression severe. "This is a problem."

"A real problem." Haruka nodded. The frog renewed its struggles and she strengthened her grip. After gazing at it thoughtfully, she put forth, "You could just kiss it anyway. I guess, worst case scenario, it turns into another princess. No one said we couldn't just make _her_ do whatever we wanted, right?"

Michiru brightened. "That makes sense," she acknowledged. Her spine stiffened, resolute. "Lift him up."

Haruka complied.

Without fanfare, hesitation, or ceremony, Michiru squinched her eyes shut and kissed the frog.

A breeze rattled the rushes. The minnow behind Michiru's ear revived and wiggled free; it fell back to the stream with a small _plunk_. A glob of mud unglued itself from Haruka's hair and followed the fish.

The frog, though, stayed a frog.

Michiru opened an eye and made a sound of dismay upon discovering this. Haruka shook her head sadly. For a moment neither princess said anything, too disappointed to really vocalize their conjoined woe. When one did deign to speak, it was by far the more optimistic part of the pair.

"Maybe the princess doing the kissing has to be from a strange land," said Michiru. She shifted her gaze to Haruka, a devilish intent gleaming within its marine depths. "Stuff like that's _really _popular in stories."

Haruka blanched. "You can't be serious."

"Dead serious," the Neptunian princess corrected.

Haruka looked down at the frog in her hands. Perhaps sensing her deliberation, it puffed out its pendulous pouch of a throat and _gweep_ed piteously.

"No."

"Yes!"

"Forget it."

"You're afraid," Michiru accused the other girl loftily. She studied her dirt-encrusted nails, faking shocked disappointment. "What happened to your skills?"

Haruka flushed a dull crimson beneath the lingering remnants of her mud mask. "I'll show you afraid," she growled. She spun the frog in sure fingers, lifted it, studied it grimly. "Pucker up, pal," she muttered, and brought the creature in a crush to her lips.

Several seconds later, Michiru touched her elbow. "Haruka."

"Mmmffh?"

"You can stop now."

Haruka looked through her lashes. The unaffected frog stared back at her. Face erupting into a pugnacious scowl, the blonde princess whipped the creature away from her mouth and hissed, "Strange land, huh?"

"It was just a thought."

"It was a _terrible _thought."

Michiru hung her head. Haruka sulked. The frog failure between them gave up the ghost of getaway and dangled. It supplied the occasional cross croak.

"I'm sorry," Michiru whispered finally.

Wiping her mouth on a sleeve, Haruka grimaced and shrugged. "Princes must be hard to find," she surmised. "It's not your fault."

Michiru made a subdued whimpering sound in response. Surprised, Haruka glanced over at the other princess and was horrified to find her close to tears. "It _is_ my fault," Michiru denied. "I went and got us dirty—"

"I like getting dirty!" Haruka interjected. She didn't think it wise to point out that their mutual filth-mongering had actually happened _before _the frog's capture.

"I got us _slimy_—"

Haruka opened her mouth to say she didn't mind slime, really, honestly, the breeches were scratchy and uncomfortable anyway and the slime was probably an improvement, but Michiru screwed up her face and moaned:

"And I said I'd tell on you and I made you kiss a _frog _and I _know _you didn't want to and there wasn't even a prince and… and… you don't like _me_, do you? I was so worried about not liking you that I didn't stop to think that you might not like _me_, and you don't, right? How could you possibly? How could you like me at _all_?"

Tears, two of them, spilled down the smaller noble's cheeks and made smeared trails in the dirt there. They winked like jewels before Michiru tucked her face into her fingers to hide her shame, her shoulders quivering beneath her saturated vest, her hair a straggling, sopping seaweed net.

Haruka reached for the other princess. Thus freed, the frog bounded euphorically into the stream's deeper currents, and its captor's hands cupped Michiru's jaw, tipped it upright again. "Hey," the blonde child managed, gruff. "Hey now. Stop that." And then, because it was true, "We're wet enough, aren't we?"

Michiru giggled through her tears and cast cautious eyes to Haruka, who smiled at her and gave each cheek in her possession a gentle pinch. "Yeah," Michiru agreed, hoarse. She reached up to take her friend's hands. She squeezed them and pronounced, "We're pretty wet."

"Mm!" Haruka chuckled. Her muffled laughter melted into muteness, however, as she studied their joined fingers, and she said suddenly, "You asked if I liked you?"

Michiru instantly straightened, serious. "Yes."

"Well," Haruka teased the girl, "as I recall, that depends."

A delighted, near-disbelieving grin bloomed on Michiru's lips, but she concurred sagaciously, "Uh-huh?"

"I caught _and _kissed a frog for you. Will you do something for me?"

"What?" Eager, the princess leaned forward.

"Someone I know needs a prince," Haruka sighed. She rolled her eyes. "Troublesome kid, really. I thought I'd try to give her one. But I found out recently that the whole thing with the frogs and the kissing—yeah. _That_ doesn't work."

Embarrassed, Michiru muttered, "It _really _doesn't."

"Mmhm. But, see—frogs are stupid. That's got to be the problem." Haruka put on a staid, sober face. "I, on the other hand, happen to have skills. It's been proven. You can ask anyone."

"Right," Michiru approved.

"So-_oooo_," Haruka proposed, "while I might not be a frog, I bet I'd make a pretty good prince anyway. What with my skills and everything." She finished, "All I need's a kiss from a princess. Want to help me with that?"

Michiru stared at her. She drew her hands from Haruka's and tucked them back into her lap. She frowned. She tensed. Discomfited, Haruka flicked her eyes away and began to say, _You don't have to if you don't want—I liked you the minute I saw you, honest_, but then Michiru's fingers were in her hair, twisting there at her temples, and the other princess apologized as their noses bumped and their cheeks collided and their lips met,

"I had to make sure you wouldn't get away—sorry! Princes are _really _hard to catch!"

They kissed.

When it was over, Haruka climbed to her feet and pulled Michiru with her. They clung to one another to keep from slipping on their way back to the bank. Once there, Michiru tugged Haruka's tunic and demanded, "Well?" She eyed the girl and admitted, grudging, "You don't _look _any different. How do you feel?"

Haruka contemplated. She flexed her slender arms, stretched them skyward, dropped them to her sides again. Curling her hands into fists, she jabbed them at an unseen foe and determined, "Princely."

"Oh really?" Michiru was unable to suppress a giggle.

"Really." Haruka nodded. She gave the other royal a superior glance. "What? You don't think I'm lying again, do you?"

Beaming, Michiru shook her head and declined, "No. I was thinking… you know…"

"Mm?"

"I was thinking," said the princess shamelessly, "we're going to make a pretty good team, my prince."

They smiled at each other, the two children, and Haruka made a short bow and responded, "I think so too." She provided her arm to Michiru. "Shall I escort you home, my princess?"

Michiru took it. Haruka picked up her boots in her free hand. Together they went back down the streambank, and amid the chorale of the frogs and the rustle of the reeds mingled the special sound of their twined laughter.


	2. Chapter Two:  Advent

**Warning: **This story implies the eventual involvement of two women together. Don't like? Don't read. Beware also minor amounts of cursing.

**Commentary: **As always, I owe a heaping helping of thanks to **lostinhersong**, who read most of this for me despite a packed schedule and gave me invaluable advice. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Gratitude also to the lovely **Fuseki**, who helped out with logistics: without her, Haruka would be wearing tunics with buttons on them. Ladies and gentlemen, tunics don't have buttons. Lastly (but not least-ly), props to an unnamed and unsung hero, who taught me that long unexpected chapters are okay, really, and long unexpected conversations are even better.

This is the story of Haruka, Michiru, and their relationship as it evolved during the Silver Millennium. They are between thirteen and fifteen years old here—you decide the specifics!

I originally didn't intend this story to be even this long, so its eventual breadth is unknown. If you like it enough to see it persist, the best way to have that happen is to **let me know**!

To all of you who read, review, message, question, critique, and encourage me: thank you so much. Please continue to do so.

As always, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

**Disclaimer: **I do not own the BSSM franchise. It belongs to the goddess Takeuchi Naoko.

* * *

_If I kiss you where it's sore  
If I kiss you where it's sore  
Will you feel better, better, better  
Will you feel anything at all?_

—Regina Spektor, "Better"

**CHAPTER TWO: Advent**

"…ru…"

She was jostled. She groaned, threw an arm across her eyes, rolled over. The bed, warmed by the spring's blooming butter-bright sun, felt delicious. She stretched her legs through its silk sheets and sighed, intent on delving directly back into the dreams from which she had been so rudely stirred.

No such luck today. A hand folded over her shoulder, shook it again. "…chiruuuuuuu," insisted the intruder.

"Nghuhm," the groggy princess opined. She flailed out fumbling fingers, found a pillow, and seized it. She picked it up and swung it at her dawnlight aggressor. Through the royal bedchamber echoed the abrupt and extraordinary sound of fabric hitting flesh and incredulous desert-dry laughter.

"Oh God, you're drooling," said the pillow-vanquished pest. "That is _so _gross. It's _everywhere_."

The princess pried open a petulant eyelid. "Nuh-uhmgeh," she denied. "Noi'm_not_unnoit_isn't_." She turned her face back into her pillow, sighed, fell still. The shade of sleep crept sweetly back over her. Satisfied, she flexed her toes and relaxed.

The bed bent as someone else took a seat on its side. A shadow fell over the prone form of the princess. Lips brushed her ear. Their owner insisted, niggling, "Yes you are!" Those lips made a sinister smile. In its silhouette, the princess shivered. "It's in your _hair_!"

A red lance of horror ran down the noble's spine. She sat up straight in the snared shell of her sheets and plunged her fingers into her locks. She found them dry, of course, and she shot a sleep-smeared glare at the unrepentantly grinning youth at her hip.

"You," she growled, "are _vile_."

"You," Haruka pronounced the princess, "are late for breakfast."

"Ugh!" Michiru fell back to the mattress and raked her sheets over her face. Her fingertips made pie-wedge dimples in the cloth. She glowered at Haruka through the gaps of her knuckles. "I don't _care_. Go _away_, you beast."

"You might not care now, but you will later, and I refuse to listen to your stomach gurgle at me during our drills. It's distracting." Haruka leaned over her friend and took twin handfuls of the sheets. Prim, she snapped them. The girl in their cocoon yelped.

"Stop that! It's cold!"

"All the more reason to get dressed," Haruka replied. She snapped the sheets again, revealing a liberal swath of ivory flesh and bunched buttercream pajamas.

"You are such a _jerk_," the princess seethed. The skin of her legs broke out into irate gooseflesh beneath her nightgown. She threw her feet over the edge of the bed, snatched her sheets from her friend, and danced across the chamber's chilled stone floors to the attached lavatory. Before she disappeared within, she fired a raspberry over her shoulder at Haruka and took special care to slam the door.

"Try not to take centuries!" Haruka called. "I smell honey-rolls!"

With the sound of scuffling and shifting, Michiru nudged the door back ajar and blinked out at the other girl. She asked around a hastily-applied toothbrush, "You haven't gone yet?"

"'Course not, idiot. I was waiting for you. I thought I heard you getting ready, you know." The visiting princess, a common sight within Triton's strong walls per the warrior-training she had shared with the resident royal since childhood, flung free a harassed sigh. "Turns out it was just you snoring."

Michiru frowned. "I 'oo _'awt_ 'ore," she protested through a mouthful of bristles and rigorous white foam.

"Sorry, what was that?" Haruka flared her fingers behind an ear. She blinked suspiciously. "I don't speak heathen."

Rolling her eyes, the princess turned her head away. She spat into the lavatory's basin and repeated, "I do _not _snore." She tossed her toothbrush into a drawer, then hooked her fingers beneath the hem of her nightgown to peel it aloft. "And you do too speak heathen. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's all you speak." She struggled with the nightgown a moment, finally jerked it off, and stuffed it into her hamper. "Why did you wait for me?"

"You're not bathing, are you?" Haruka whined. "That _will _take centuries. We'll miss breakfast and lunch—maybe even dinner, too."

"I might rinse off. For your sake, I'm leaving my hair for the evening. Now." Michiru stuck her head back around the door even as she stepped into her undergarments. "Don't try to change the subject. You're terrible at it. Why did you wait for me?"

She staggered, off balance. Haruka reached out to brace the princess, gazed down the line of the other girl's slight spine, and murmured, "Did you know that you have a bruise on your butt shaped like a frying pan?"

"Haruka!"

"What?" asked the blonde. "You do. Right cheek. Dead center." She considered. "All right. Maybe not _dead _center, but it's pretty close."

"First, _stop looking at my butt_. It's unbecoming. Second, if you change the subject one more time I'll _hit _you with a frying pan, all right?"

"What was the original subject again?" Haruka queried. She heeded both demands and flicked her gaze to the ceiling.

"Why you waited for me."

"Right." Thoughtful, the taller girl tapped a lip. "Hmm…"

"Hm-_mmm_?"

"Because you always give me your honey-roll, and that's the only way I'll get two," Haruka admitted at last.

With an explosive sigh, Michiru drew back into the bathroom and kicked the door closed. "Pig!" she accused the other noble. The fondness in her tone was unmistakable, though, and she continued, "Next time, don't be so greedy and go on down to breakfast. We can't both afford to be hungry during drills."

"Yeah? Why's that?" Haruka turned her shoulders to the door, slanting her eyes against the room's strengthening brilliance. To hurry things along, she set about making Michiru's bed for her, eyeing in high good humor the drying puddle of drool on her friend's favorite pillow. Haruka charitably flipped the cushion's case inside out so the princess would be spared later embarrassment.

Michiru's voice wafted to her from the bathroom between the sudden gurgle of water in the palace pipes. "I need you to watch my back if I'm too busy bemoaning a lost breakfast to see something coming." She dropped a bottle, cursed. "Like that! My _toes_!"

"No suffering in solidarity, huh?" Haruka mused. She smoothed the sheets free of wrinkles on the bed's left side and stepped around next to the right, where a sea of silk ripples waited. They riled her decorous tendencies. As she made to press them stiff again, she slid her fingers beneath the rim of the mattress. The tips brushed a hard, unexpected thing there. Frowning, she grappled for it, tugged it free, brought it to light.

It was a book. She flipped it in her fingers and studied the spine, but found no title. Curious, she pulled the cover open and skimmed the first page. Her eyes caught a looping letter and she read:

—_ripped a massive hole in my stockings. I was so embarrassed that I might have died, but Haruka stood in front of me in lessons and she's so tall now that I disappeared behind her. Even though I complained about not being able to see, I'm so glad she was there and I just don't know what I'd do without her sometim—_

Michiru said something from the lavatory. Blinking, Haruka tore her eyes from the apparent diary and called back, startled ego swollen to approximately the size of Mars, "What?"

"I said, suffering is never a thing that should be shared between us! Also," and here Michiru's words trilled into triumph, "it's official. My bra? Is too small."

For reasons she could not fully explain, Haruka felt her heart enact a gleeful pitty-pat at the shared revelation of her best friend's blossoming bosoms. "Good for you," she muttered.

"Eh? Speak up!"

Closing the book in her hand with a decisive snap, Haruka shouted in reply, "I'm _so glad _you're growing a couple of _melons _on your chest!"

The other princess laughed. "Jealous?" she taunted. The water went off.

"They get in the way," Haruka disagreed. She glanced back down at the book again, worried her thumb along its wax-wear binding. She moved to shove it back into its secret place beneath the mattress—but it bounced against the bedframe, dropped from her fingers, fell open in a scatter of pages on the floor below. Kneeling to retrieve it, she cast a furtive glance to the lavatory. A small series of soft pops and clicks from within ensured that Michiru was messing around with her umpteen million lotions. Based on how long she knew that particular lathering process usually took, Haruka determined she had at least three minutes before her friend was due to make an appearance back in the bedchamber.

She wasn't the fastest reader. Still, three minutes…

She picked up the diary, rose with it in splayed hands, and took a seat gingerly on the bed she was nearly finished neatening. She gazed for a moment at nothing. Sunspots crawled across her vision; shame and curiosity warred within her as skirts war with summer breezes. Finally the latter won out, and she let her eyes drop to the revealed page and read:

—_hate the winter so much, because then I can't see her and it's so lonely. No one to laugh with, or cry with (although I've never seen her cry and if I did I might just freak out), no one to tell me my butt doesn't look big in the ceremonial court dresses they make me wear—_

Haruka snorted. The dresses made _everything _on Michiru look big, but she saw no reason to tell the princess such distressing information. Biting her lip, she picked up again a line or two later:

—_season just stretches on forever. I wish they would let me visit her. They say the climate's too different—that my constitution would suffer. What does that mean? I'm not frail like Mama was. I know it's dry there. I know it's desert that goes on and on. But there must be similarities between Neptune and Uranus just as much as there are similarities between Haruka and me! If she can be happy here, why couldn't I be happy there? _

And then, crammed into the bottom of the page in a hurried scrawl:

_They underestimate me. I'll show them one day. I know that anywhere she is, I'll be fine too._

In her heart Haruka felt an odd heaviness, a creeping kind of heat not unlike that which comes from the stirring of smoldering coals. With careful fingers she traced the cramped words, lips parted, pulse a hammer-mine melody in her ears. "That's," she whispered to herself, "that's just—"

"—listening to me?"

"Uh?" Haruka choked. Her tongue tangled in her mouth and she jerked her eyes up again, but the lavatory door was still closed.

"Are you _listening _to me?" Michiru's voice demanded. "I've asked you maybe five questions and you haven't said _anything_. You didn't find my store of chocolates, did you?"

Golden brows rose in immediate interest. "You have a store of chocolates?"

"…_noooo_," Michiru denied. "But really, why are you so quiet?"

"Rifling through your underwear drawer is a thing best done silently," Haruka advised her friend.

Michiru giggled. "I decree and so it is writ: you're a strange one, Haruka."

"Aa," agreed the blonde. Jiggling the diary on a nervous knee, she flipped a sheaf of pages and, when she was certain Michiru still had ablutions to perform, lowered her gaze back to the book's offerings.

What she saw made her skin crawl.

—_he works in the stables. He's tall, tall like the ripple-plants are tall, and his hair glitters like flax glitters, and his hands are hard and heavy when they guide mine over saddlebrim and bridle and oh, they make me think of things I shouldn't. Terrible things. Forbidden things. Sometimes I go down just to look at him, and I watch his hair in the sunlight but especially I watch those hands of his, and I think—_

The lavatory doorknob clicked as it spun. Haruka jackknifed upright, performed a pirouette the likes of which made the seams of her breeches creak, and thrust the damnable diary back beneath the mattress. She turned toward the bathroom just as Michiru stepped from it.

"See what I mean?" asked the other princess, who was mostly nude still. Chin pointed toward her budding chest, Michiru folded her arms behind her head and bounced what bosoms she possessed. They strained against the fabric of her bindings. "Look at that," she hissed smugly. "They're barely staying in."

"It's unbecoming for me to look at your butt, but I can look at your boobs?" Haruka wondered. She flicked her eyes to the breasts in question, felt fire flare over her face, and looked pointedly away again. Blood pounded in her temples. "That's curvaceous discrimination."

"No," Michiru disagreed, rocking on the balls of her feet, "that's consent." She turned her face up, grinning. "A whole _lot _of consent."

Haruka smirked back despite the prickle of dismayed unease in the pit of her belly. "If that's a lot," she goaded the smaller girl, "I'm afraid to know what you'd say about mine."

"Your what? Your insect bites?"

"Hey!"

Michiru giggled and pranced over to her bureau, where she took a self-satisfied seat and began to sort through her combs. "Find me a tunic, please," she requested of Haruka. She popped a pin into her mouth and cocked her head, examining the tumble of her curls with evaluative fingertips. "Preferably one without a million holes in it." She paused, rolled the pin between her lips, nibbled it. "And the tawny leggings. You know the ones."

"Will there be anything else, mistress?" Haruka snickered. She nevertheless slipped dutifully to Michiru's dresser and pulled open its lowermost drawer. Pawing through the garments therein, she muttered, "You have more pants than I have clothes in general, you know."

"Some people have different priorities." Michiru smiled at her, indulgent. "Who here has enough boots to shod the entire western quarter?"

"You can never have too many boots," Haruka shot back. She found the desired leggings, unfolded them, and leaned across the separation between them to drape them over the back of Michiru's chair. "They're dead useful."

"And pants aren't?" Michiru wound her hair into a tight tail and pinned the base of it. She gave her friend a hopeful wide-eyed look. "You just want to see me without them. Admit it."

Rifling through a second drawer, the blonde came upon an acceptable tunic. She rose with it and reminded her fellow noble, "I'm seeing you without them right now and all it's useful for is making me miss breakfast. Arms up."

Michiru pushed her palms skyward. Haruka dropped the tunic over them and watched the princess wriggle into its coarse confines, grunting as the cloth buzzed her nose. "Scratchy," she complained.

"Durable," Haruka argued. She tugged the available ponytail.

"Braid that," Michiru commanded. "You're faster than me at it."

"It'll be crooked," Haruka warned.

"It'll be charming." Michiru fluttered her lashes. "Everyone tells me so. Besides, your hands help me concentrate during my exercises." Opening the drawer of the bureau nearest her knee, the royal pulled from it a looking glass mounted upon a sculpted beryl-brass grip. She spun it in idle fingers, held it up to Haruka. "Do you see anything?" she asked.

_My hands helping you_, Haruka thought, and the prickle in her belly spread up through her torso like thorns. _But not like his hands, his stupid hard heavy hands_—

The mirror's silver surface stretched into her vision and she blinked. There was no reflection there: only a blank metal oval, flat and filled with a sinister, otherworldly shine. She studied it a moment, silent, and determined, "Nothing."

"I never see much either," Michiru pouted. "Just ripples." She lowered the mirror and held it out at arm's length, eyes slanted. Her shoulders rose and fell in a slow, slipping sigh. "Braid," she reminded Haruka, and turned her attention to the elliptical of the looking glass. Her gaze fogged. Her head sagged a bit. In an instant her awareness seeped away to shores upon which crashed waves of pure probability and potential, and Haruka took up teal tresses in her fingers to both twine them and to anchor her friend in what she perceived as true time.

It took less than two minutes to complete the braid. When it was done, Haruka weighed it carefully in a palm and smoothed her thumb along its satin underside. As predicted, it canted crookedly to the right. The plaits were uneven too. Frowning at the sight its marine wick made against her calloused flesh, the taller princess gave it an idle tweak and wondered suddenly:

_Have __**his**__ hands ever touched her hair?_

She stiffened. The images rolled into her mind before she could stop them:

_Michiru in her riding clothes in the sun-stippled shade of the stables, laughing, the legs of her shadow crisscrossed with those of another, one tall like the ripple-plants are tall and his fingers descending into the waves of her curls, plunging deep to push and part them and his nails grating behind her ear just the way she likes it and his face close to her face and—_

"Haruka."

Snapped out of her reverie by the anxious note in her friend's voice, Haruka asked, "What?" She turned inquisitive eyes to the mirror Michiru clutched. "Did you see something?"

"Yes," Michiru agreed, but she tipped her head back and aimed her gaze up at the other princess instead, the looking glass and its plausible problems forgotten. She turned it facedown on the bureau and reached up to touch her fellow noble's cheek.

_Hands_, Haruka thought miserably. She voiced, "The mirror—"

"Not in the mirror. I don't need that to see something's the matter with you." She prodded Haruka's nosetip with a chiding finger. "You're pulling my hair. Stop it, how about?"

"Oh!" Humiliated, Haruka released the braid in question from a hand that had instinctively furled into a fist. "I'm sorry, Michiru."

"Don't apologize." Michiru spun in the chair, her palms pressed to her bare knees, her ankles meticulously crossed. "Tell me what's wrong instead."

"Nothi—"

"Haruka, we have been friends for almost eight years now and today marks the first time you have _ever _pulled my hair while brushing it." Michiru gave her a severe frown. "What is it your father likes to say?" She thought about it, face scrunched, and determined, "Cut the bullshit, okay? You won't get away with it." The royal's brightsky eyes narrowed, jaundiced. "I know where you live."

_But they'd never let you come see me, no matter how much we wanted it, and you know it and I know you know it because I read what you wrote, oh God I wish I hadn't read what you wrote, _Haruka reasoned privately. Out loud she maintained, affecting an air of wearing patience, "I'm _hungry_, you brat. And someone still doesn't have pants on."

Michiru heaved a blustery sigh, threw up her hands, and turned the chair to face the bureau proper again. "Fine. _Fine_," she griped. "You great flat-chested nuisance."

"I'm not _that _flat."

"Plywood has more bounce than you," Michiru told her gently. She provided Haruka's knuckles a sympathetic pat.

"At least I don't look like I've got a couple of gooby-fruits stapled to my ribs."

"Gooby-fruits?" Michiru smirked. She picked up the mirror again and turned it upright, her thumbnail making soft _tik-tik _sounds in its caress down the beveled handle. "What happened to melons?"

"I was feeling generous then."

"Uh-huh." Michiru rolled her eyes, took a deep breath. She let it out slowly and informed her friend in something close to a growl, "You can't hide it from me for long, Haruka, whatever it is."

"It's not—"

"_Whatever_," insisted the princess, "it is." She dropped her eyes to the mirror's surface and muttered, "You can be all deceptive and cool and moody around other people, but don't try it with me. I…" Her voice dropped, shaded; her gaze misted over. "…know you…" She tapped slow, stuttery fingers between her collarbones. "…here." Her soul fell into the sea of the mirror once more and Haruka monitored the slump of her shoulders, silent, subdued.

She reached out finally and took hold of Michiru's braid again. Worrying the warm length in fingers she no longer felt were good enough, she whispered, "I _am_ sorry I pulled your hair."

Moments passed, and because Haruka found favor in brooding, she didn't count them. Instead she fixed her gaze angrily on her friend's bed—especially the upper rightmost corner—and mused whether there was any world wherein a stablehand could be worthy of Michiru. Would he know when teasing was too much and tender too troublesome? Was it even remotely possible for him to be able to tell the difference between her giggles of contrition and contempt? Was he the sort of person to remind her to put on a cloak when the rainstorms blew in from across the plateaus, and to watch her step on the garden pathways too? Would he be there to catch her when she slipped—when her hand grasped at air and her lips parted and she cried out wordlessly—

Michiru yelped and jerked beneath Haruka's touch as though struck. Only quick reflexes saved the blonde soldier from ripping out her braid by the roots.

"What?" Haruka half-snarled, startled. "I didn't pull it this time! I swear I didn't!"

Clapping her free fingers over her mouth, the smaller princess swept her mirror to her chest and spun in her seat to look up at her partner. Her eyes burned. "I saw something," she said excitedly.

Haruka bristled and her heart dropped into the dent between her feet. "What?" she demanded. Her words fell from her mouth in a tumbling, surprised sputter. "What was it?"

"It…" Michiru bit her lip. She carefully settled her mirror back on the bureau, stood, planted her palms on Haruka's shoulders. She was trembling. Leaning in, she rested her cheek on the taller girl's chest and squeezed her eyes shut. Her nails bit into the soft padding beneath Haruka's tunic. "It…"

"Oi, Michiru," Haruka worried. Her heart gave a harassed double-knock behind the door of her ribs—she wrapped loose, leery arms about the princess. "Take it easy. Come on." Arching her neck protectively over the blue head beneath her chin, she ran cautious fingers down Michiru's shivery spine and repeated, "Tell me—what was it?"

Michiru looked up. The glint of her gaze beneath the perfect sickle-moon curtains of her eyelids did strange things to Haruka's blood pressure. Pulling in a shaking breath, the princess managed, strangled, "It… it was me getting the last honey-roll."

Grinning a shark's grin, Michiru gave Haruka a shove. Her elbow dug mercilessly into the blonde's ribs. A goodly bit of air in Haruka's lungs left in a low, hoarse _ufff_ and she stumbled backward, shocked into temporary inaction. She could only watch as her friend, crooked braid and all, rocketed from the room at a dead run. The young royal's voice reverberated back in a roundhouse ripple against the palace's stone walls:

"That's for saying I _snore_!"

Despite the acquisition of a new bruise and a solo trot down to the mess hall, though, Haruka had the last laugh.

"I can't _believe _you let me run all the way down here without my leggings," Michiru hissed at Haruka a few minutes later. Sequestered into the back of the hall in an attempt to hide copious amounts of bare flesh, the princess was nevertheless already the brunt of a bevy of snickers from the morning's rotation of hungry soldiers.

"You forgot your shoes too," Haruka reminded the smaller noble. She settled the missing clothing generously on the bench next to Michiru and murmured, "That's what you get for trying to one-up me, you twit."

"Who's a twit?" Michiru asked hotly. She held up a glistening bit of bread and arched an aquamarine brow. "This really _is _the last one."

"Never heard of a twit," sighed the defeated taller princess. Her eyes followed that bread, lusty.

"Mmhm." Michiru made to hand over the honey-roll—paused, smirked. "Stand right here," she commanded, waving to the spot at her side. "Do that thing you do—you know. Look menacing."

Haruka followed these directions. Michiru rewarded Haruka the honey-roll and, as her friend munched it happily, finished dressing in the safety of her long shadow. Once Michiru was suitably garbed, the visiting noble provided her a hand up and they went together to procure trays of breakfast proper. They ate it with shoulders brushing and elbows warring into collision courses over napkins. Michiru stole Haruka's sausage—or rather, Haruka let her whilst simultaneously liberating the smaller princess of a cinnamon rice-cracker wafer. All around their table the citadel's regiments moved and mulled in pursuit of the morning meal, and eventually the two princesses made room for them and slipped from the palace to the practice grounds.

As their instructor, a Martian muscleman with a killer haymaker, led them through the drills and attack patterns they had practiced since childhood, Haruka caught herself evolving a suspicious idea. Suppose she checked out this flaxen-haired stablehand with the hard heavy hands? Suppose she engaged him in conversation? Suppose she gave him the benefit of the doubt and provided him the opportunity to… impress her as he had apparently impressed her friend?

Neatly sidestepping a bright ball of superheated seawater, Haruka felt her stomach clench. "I really don't care how shiny his damn hair is," she muttered. Reaching deep within herself, she drew a fistful of energy to clenched fingers, rolled it, let it fly. It wobbled crookedly and crashed, premature, into the fine froth of sand scattered across the field. Michiru giggled from behind a pylon and screeched to her,

"IS THAT THE BEST YOU'VE GOT, HOTHAND?"

"YOU didn't make a hit _EITHER_!" Haruka roared in turn. Her fingers twitched and sparked, and she sent another spitting orange globe soaring toward her friend's hiding place. It broke into thousands of pieces and Michiru, an azure blur, shot away from it with a shrieked shout of laughter.

"Someone's weak on the left todaaaaay," she taunted.

Haruka fumed. She ran pell-mell at the other princess and for a while, at least, she forgot about the stablehand.

Lunchtime came. Worn and ravenous, Haruka settled with Michiru on the hillside overlooking the practice field—now full of craters—and devoured her midday meal in studious silence. Behind them the sea undulated in its heady summertime surge, and Michiru sighed as she pulled her biscuit apart, "He's really pushing us hard. My hands are chapped."

_Hands_, Haruka thought. Her food melted to ash in her mouth, but she forced it down and turned her eyes over to Michiru's fingers. The digits were indeed an angry, blistered red. "Do they hurt?" she asked.

"Mm? Well, a little," Michiru admitted. She flexed the fingers in question, popped a bit of bread into her mouth, and chewed resolutely. "You're lucky you don't have to fling around saltwater all day."

"Yeah, I just get to play around with wind and dirt," sighed the blonde. She kicked a leg and watched said dirt puff from every stitch in the breeches, resigned. "I have grit in places I'm not sure I'll be able to reach later."

"Oooh," Michiru observed sympathetically, and winced.

They ate in companionable quiet. Michiru turned sideways to look out over the waves, wistful; Haruka, thoughtful in her own right, nibbled the paper wrapper left over from her meal. Soon unable to bear it, the latter stood, dusted off her clothing as much as she was able, and glanced down at her cohort. "I'll be back soon," she said.

"Where are you going?" Michiru smiled up at her, leaning over to rest her head against a dusty knee.

"To run a quick errand—and to get some salve for your hands." Absent, Haruka smoothed a tangle from Michiru's sea-green hair. She smirked. "Gonna be all right without me for a bit?"

Michiru threw a hand over her eyes and flopped back into the grass. A displaced cricket scurried away from the royal's ear. "I'll nap," she informed her friend. "Don't be back late, you sweetheart, you. You know how he hates that."

"Mm. Try not to drool too much," Haruka teased the reclining princess. A well-placed raspberry followed her progress down the hillside and along the edge of the practice field.

Five minutes found Haruka leaving the palace infirmary with a small jar of the promised salve and a hot intent in her heels. Tossing the container between idle hands, she slipped through the citadel's cloisters and secret staircases, passageways memorized in mazes of summers past. She crossed courtyards bereft of attention, and the grass therein swayed high at her hips and left cockleburs on her boots. When she reached the stables, she shook those burrs free, kicked them alongside the worn path to prevent their pricking any other passersby, and stepped inside.

Dust motes danced on sunlight sloping in through scattered cracks in the shingles overhead. Haruka inhaled, reveling silently in the honeyed scent of horses and hay that came with such a place. The beasts here were slower than those on her homeworld and lacked wings too, but she felt an instinctive fondness for them even so. She moved to the nearest stall and clucked her tongue at the creature within, smiling at its curious meander closer. Her reflection affixed in the pendant of its dark eye, Haruka stretched her fingers through the stall slats. She whispered, "Where's the person who takes care of you, huh?"

Fortune sang; destiny knocked; the threads of fate wound their knot about Haruka's heart and a voice from behind postulated airily, "That would be me, I guess."

Haruka turned. In the dooryard stood a youth whose hair did indeed, she had to admit, glitter like flax glittered. The slender, reedy stablehand blinked bleary blue eyes at her and rubbed a bristle-bush cheek. Bits of straw adorned his clothes; the fine sheen of horsehair on his arms suggested a morning spent in intimate cohort with a currycomb. He looked benign, harmless.

"Hello," she offered. The horse in the stall at her back inquisitively nibbled the padding beneath the shoulderblade of her tunic. She wiggled away from it.

Lifting a hand—_That doesn't look so heavy_, Haruka mused—the stablehand shielded his eyes and squinted at her. Those eyes widened not a second later. "Princess?" he asked.

"I'd say the one and only, but that's not true," Haruka agreed. She jerked the man a small bow. It pained her pride considerably. "Haruka."

"Kenji," he replied. His hair caught the sunlight in the respectful gesticulation he bounced back at her—damn him, it was near blinding. He swept upright again, stiff-legged. She saw the makings of a soldier in him and her guts roiled. "At your service, of course."

"No need," she dismissed him. She shifted to stick her hand through the stall's slats once more, eyes sliding to half-mast at the familiar prickle-pressure of the horse's muzzle against her palm. She insisted, "Consider me common." By such a decree, Haruka offered her solemn promise that she and Kenji were equals so long as she stood in his stables, neither of them able to control or command the other.

The apparent Kenji relaxed. He began to pick straw particles from his tunic, watching her sidelong. By the length of his thin face and the gangling knobs of his knees, Haruka pegged him a year or so her senior. "Never thought to see you here," he admitted, pinching a loose fleck of silage away. "Heard these guys were a bit too slow for you." His arm rose and fell in a wave meant to encompass the occupants of the stable entirely.

"They _are _slow," Haruka affirmed. Showing the stablehand the sharp brevity of her shoulders, she turned to offer the horse in her chosen stall both hands. The large creature huffed at the pungent smell of the packaged salve. Haruka smiled. "Too much, yes, for me. But that doesn't mean I can't like them, does it?"

Footsteps, shuffling ones. From the corner of her eye she saw him move closer, his hair a bronze starburst backlit by noon's brazen rays. "Guess not," he opined. He was looking at her in the incredulous way the palace cooks did when she asked for seaweed salad. Licking her lips, she drew her hands reluctantly back from the stall, tucked them behind her person, twined them.

They stared at each other: Kenji shamelessly, studiously, Haruka in growing exasperation. "What?" she demanded at last.

"You're—you're here," the stablehand observed. "Talking to me." He grinned, aimed a thumb at himself. He had perfect teeth, square white millstones sure to set plenty a lady's heart aflutter—or so she surmised. Her own sat immobile in her chest, heavier than a hunk of granite and about as cold as one too. He managed next in a jovial half-laugh more mocking than she liked, "Wait until my friends hear it! You _do _speak!" He rapped his chest and the horse behind Haruka made a muffled sound suspiciously close to a snort. "I'll be damned!"

Haruka frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?" she murmured. Disquiet pulsed in her temples and she worried the jar of salve around the well of a palm suddenly creased by sweat. _I don't like him_, she realized. _I never had a hope of liking him and I'm here anyway, and I shouldn't be, and I should go, I should really g—_

"Well," said the stablehand, "you just never talk, is all. Not to anyone but the princess."

"Is there something wrong with that?" The words came out in a cold snap. The mere mention of Michiru drew bloody barbs across Haruka's vision. She blinked them away, or tried.

"Well now, not a bit," the stablehand opined. "Just gives you the air of—uh." He paused, eyed her. "Speak freely, might I? Not gonna fire off one of those fireballs at me?"

"You're entitled to your opinion about me as much as the next person," Haruka allowed. "And they aren't fireballs. They're—"

"Scary as hell."

"Right, well." The princess attempted not to preen. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all, this guy. "They're not made of fire. They're rapidweight concentric clusters of seismic energy."

The stablehand considered this. He found a stiff straw in the lining of his tunic, pulled it free, and stuck it between his perfect teeth. He wiggled it about a few seconds, contemplative, and pronounced finally, "Yeah. Scary as hell. But anyway—you seem kind of cold. Unapproachable. You know? Like you've got a stick lodged somewhere rather vital."

"Such candor," Haruka remarked, dry.

"Yeah, I get that a lot." Kenji polished his dirty nails on the rigid hem of his chaps. "You want a little more?"

Leaning against the stall gate, Haruka permitted, "Couldn't hurt."

She was wrong.

"You might seem cold, but I get you," Kenji supplied. "I mean, really." He gave Haruka a lecherous grin and drummed his fingers against his meager breastbone. "I only see her for riding lessons, but I'd spend all the time in the world with the princess too if I could, if you know what I mean."

A faint red mist gathered behind Haruka's eyes. _Oh_, she thought, and then, _oh he's not that stupid, surely._

"I'm afraid," she vocalized coolly, "I don't quite know what you mean, no. Clarify it for me, why not?"

The stablehand mistook the frigid shrapnel in the visiting royal's tone for a sharp kind of camaraderie. "She's awfully cute, isn't she?" he ventured. "The way she laughs—she has this giggle, you know. I'm sure you've heard it."

Haruka had. The thought of that special sound shared with another shot off slow, searing fireworks in her brain. Her teeth itched. The jar of salve creaked in a clenching hand and she managed, jaw a tight trap of tension, "Aa." She rationalized mentally, _Be fair. Anyone can have a crush. It's perfectly innocent. It's perfectly sweet—_

"—and her chest!" sighed the stablehand, lost in the foggy, pubescent euphoria of a teen with barely-there balls. He clapped a hand over Haruka's arm. With the fingers of the other, he mimed jiggling swells nearby his sternum and gave Haruka a questioning look. "She's got to be, what, at least a—"

Haruka dropped the jar of salve and closed her fingers over Kenji's instead. She squeezed them—not as hard as she was able, but enough that the stablehand's knuckles gave a resounding rapidfire crackle.

He yelped and jerked backward, cradling the wounded appendage. "What the hell!" he barked at her, words reedily wronged. His eyes bulged.

"Talk about her chest again and I'll break that for real, right along the rest of you," Haruka informed the other teenager delicately.

The stablehand opened his mouth, started to say something, closed it again. He looked down at his fingers, flexed them—they snapped a second time, much like winter twigs. He grimaced and mumbled, "So that's how it is. We all thought so."

"What?" Haruka struggled to keep her voice level. "That's how _what _is?"

"You two. You're together. It's true, isn't it?"

_Isn't it?_

The blonde princess gaped at the stablehand. All the spit in her mouth dried up; the bruise Michiru had provided her some odd hours earlier gave a low, leprous throb. Blood pounded in a rude ribboning rumble between her ears and she licked her lips and furled her fingers at her sides and thought again:

_Isn't it?_

"Yeah," Kenji sneered, malevolently enchanted by her stunned silence. "Yeah, oh yeah, that face. No question about it, huh? Wait'll I tell my friends. Just wai—"

"You won't tell anyone _anything_," snarled the noble. Her tongue twisted itself into knots in her mouth; her usual composure fled her in the wake of a rising, horrified fury. "You won't, you, you—!"

The stablehand laughed. Haruka observed the flicker-flash of his perfect teeth and plotted which ones to knock out first. "Me, me!" he mocked. He smirked at her and fluttered his hands—one still more gingerly than the other, she noted with a second's satisfaction—beneath his chin. "How can you stop me? 'Consider me common,' you said. You can't order me to do _anything _so long as we're in here, princes—no. _Haruka. _Did you forget? By your own words, you're just another kid—same as me."

"Can't order you to do anything," Haruka concurred. She shifted her legs into a bent V, crouched; she brought up her hands and folded them into firm fists. Showing him the brazen bumps of her knuckles, she insisted, "Common or not, I _can_ kick your ass."

He dropped his eyes down her slight form. They lingered on her washboard chest. "Sorry," he denied. "I don't fight little girls."

Haruka cocked her head. She stepped into the pool of light before the youth, closing the distance between them. Flecks of chaff wafted up around her ankles. She looked over the blade of her nose at him, the thunderclouds in her gaze a squalling tempest, her mouth a sharp hard line. Despite the discrepancy in their heights of an inch or so, their eyes met evenly enough. Bracing the brunt of her palm against his collar, she hissed, "Little?"

She shoved him.

He went down in a startled tumble, arms thrown akimbo, legs splayed. He landed half on his back in the middle of the dooryard. He scrabbled for purchase, face abruptly terrified, hands worrying up rivers of dust along the building's dirt floor.

Baring her teeth at him in a predatory smile, Haruka advanced and suggested, "Get up."

"You'll burn me alive!"

"I might _beat you to death_," the princess acknowledged, "but I'm not going to use my powers on a rat like you. Get _up_, Kenji. Come on." She beckoned with the tips of her fingers alone. "This little girl is waiting."

Kenji stared up at the vengeful almost-soldier: saw the twitch of her brow, the quivery contraction of her fists, the wrath quivering in all the taut beams of her narrow body. His heart flipped in the shallow cavern of his chest like a beached fish. His courage—and to be fair, he did have _some_—quailed. Before him yawned a specimen of certain strength far greater than his own, and she frightened him, and the low gray light in her eyes said she could kill him and care less. He realized that suddenly, abruptly, intimately.

Faced with such an epiphany, he did the first foolish thing to leap into his brain. He grasped out with frantic fingers. He found a hard rounded thing, groped for it, took it into the bower of a trembling thumb.

He threw it and a handful of dirt into Haruka's face.

The jar of salve hit the royal's temple and shattered into fragments. Glob and grit blinded the princess—she clutched at her burning eyes with an enraged, disbelieving bellow. She staggered sideways, one half of her vision a yellow brightboom of seething stars, the other all sludgy smears and needle-prick pain. She opened her mouth to curse—

A fist steamrolled into the prow of her nose.

_Oh his hands ARE heavy, _she thought. Bone crunched, crumpled; blood spurted down her face in a warm torrent. Her upper lip split open like the skin of a melon and she tasted copper, her mouth was full of it, and—

A knee this time, driven deep into the pit of her belly. She retched out a hoarse, "_Uff_!" and folded forward, rust rattling in her nostrils, eyes awash with inadvertent tears. She hit the floor of the stables broadside, gagging. She sunfished, clawed out at a foe she was unable to see. He kicked her—the bastard, he _kicked_ her! Her guts screamed and her gorge rose in her throat and he was saying something, something about how she wasn't as tough as she looked, huh, and—

The world went up in blue. Even through the blood in her nose Haruka could smell sudden seawater, and the tears were doing their job besides. She saw the blurred shape of Kenji go sailing into the far wall of the stables, hurled there by a luminescent teal orb; she saw tawny legs scissor into focus before her. Mostly, though, she heard Michiru's voice, the noble's usually buoyant tone laced now with the cruel, creeping quiet that comes just before a crushing wave.

"Give me a good reason," the Neptunian princess addressed the soaked, gasping stablehand, "not to drown you."

Kenji choked, half in terror and half on brine. In the stalls around them horses shifted uneasily. Haruka struggled to breathe, chin a froth of blood and grime, torso a lockbox of electric agony.

"Majesty, please!" the stablehand begged.

"I'm waiting," Michiru reminded Kenji. Her fingers sparked with a soft simmer-sky light. "But I won't much longer."

"She," the stablehand managed, "she! Sh-she started it!"

Silence fell, stretching and startled and incredulous. In the servant quarters nearby a man shouted, laughed; feed crunched as one of the building's occupants, unimpressed by the commotion, took its midday meal. Summer wind sighed through the eaves and hay rustled in the loft and Michiru—oh, Michiru giggled.

The sound so devoid of soul turned Kenji's face fishbelly white.

"I said a _good _reason," the princess chided. She lifted a hand. Ethereal azure light filled the palm of that hand, bent its fingers in a lotus-linger cradle. Michiru spun it, tensed a leg, made to throw her weapon of watery death.

Haruka touched a crimson wrist to her friend's ankle and rasped, "No."

"Mm?" Michiru glanced down at her. The missile above her fingers guttered a bit, shrunk. Its luminosity cast eerie kelp-green shadows along the chinked stone walls. Through runny eyes Haruka could only just make out the shape of her defender's face. "No?" Michiru echoed.

Haruka drew in a breath that burned all the way down, let it out again, spat. Her lip stung. Her nose dribbled. "Mine," she snarled, and then, "_mine_. Later." She finished, a bubbly wheezing growl, "Please."

Michiru hesitated for the briefest moment, her gaze torn between cowering servant and battered friend. She decided ultimately she cared more to attend one above the other, and she sighed as the ringed sphere in her hand faded to nothing, "You're so _greedy_, really! First breakfast—now him. We need to have a serious talk about this, Haruka."

Mopping her mouth with the back of her hand, Haruka grinned a feral carmine grin and agreed, "Uh-huh." To Kenji she hissed, words a gravel-ground grimjaw horror, "Go. _Go_. And expect me. Hear me? Do you _hear me_?"

Kenji heard. Wordless in his terror, he scrabbled to his feet and ran from the stables as fast as they could carry him. Bits of the salve jar tinkled in his wake.

Heedless of those sharp shards, Michiru dropped to her knees beside Haruka and asked in a terrified whisper, all evidence of cold combatant instantly vanished, "Haruka, what—why… your poor _nose_!"

"It's broken," the other princess agreed. She touched the crooked tip of it with ginger fingers. It crunched audibly. Michiru shivered and Haruka nearly threw up.

"Come on," the smaller girl demanded a moment later. She tucked her palms beneath Haruka's elbows and gave the bleeding royal a tug. "Up. I'll take care of you."

Haruka wobbled upright, an arm tucked into the crease of her sore middle. Michiru took the other and guided it around her shoulders. "I'll drip on you," Haruka warned, but then they were moving and shuffling and step-staggering through the dooryard and out into the bright summer sun. The blonde looked up. Her eyes watered, stinging. "Shit," she opined weakly, and sneezed.

Blood sprayed. Agony cleaved through Haruka's head, a shuddering lance; her stomach fluttered and her legs turned to water. She sagged. Through a gray haze she heard Michiru worriedly cry out her name. She swayed, poleaxed by the suffering throb of her sinuses, the majority of her weight thrust into Michiru's guiding clasp. She buckled. She fell.

Michiru spun sideways to catch her. They sprawled together in a heap of trembling limbs and smeared sanguine sweat. Nails bit into her hip and Haruka groaned; another hand pattered over her jaw, found her hair, twisted in it. Her cheek rolled into a soft crevice. She closed her eyes. She panted, shamed. She rested. Michiru let her, cradled her.

Neither girl said anything. When Haruka could see the world without it spinning like a top, she forced herself vertical once more and Michiru helped her. They went back through the courtyards and the palace proper in a grim, gruesome kind of quiet, heedless of the stares they received from staff and imperial company. Haruka bled on some of the citadel's finest carpets. Michiru warned off commentary regarding that fact with a gaze more frigid than her sovereign planet's arctic oceans.

They made it finally to the fledgling monarch's room. Michiru led Haruka to her bed, pushed the protesting blonde against its edge.

The backs of Haruka's knees bumped the fringe of the mattress. "I'm disgusting," she objected. She quivered despite her bravado, seesawing between a hunch and a pained half-crouch.

"You're hurt," Michiru corrected. She took hold of her friend's shoulders and thrust her down, or tried. "_Sit_."

Haruka did, resigned. Satisfied, Michiru hooked her fingers in the hem of the other royal's tunic. "My turn, this time," she teased Haruka gently. "Arms up."

Haruka lifted them. Carefully her friend peeled the tunic up and away, and knelt too so she could unlace Haruka's boots and shimmy off the breeches above. Soon garbed in breastbindings and undergarments alone, the blonde wrapped her arms defensively across her darkening belly, elbows braced on her knees, head canted crookedly backward. She slanted her eyes shut.

Gaze reminiscent of a typhoon's windbands, Michiru rubbed a thumb tentatively over the shoe-print beneath Haruka's ribs. "You bruise like a fruit, I swear," she muttered, fury and distress coloring the words quiet. She rose and slipped into the bathroom.

Moments later she took a seat next to Haruka on the bed and began to dab a wet cloth through the taller girl's straw-encrusted cowlicks. Said cloth came away dark, riddled with chaff and silt. The princesses eyed it together, apprehensive. "I should just bathe," the blonde said.

"I'm not going to have you drown in my tub," Michiru replied smartly. She leaned in, frowning at a clot in Haruka's stiff yellow locks. "What's this stuff?"

Haruka checked, exploring said stuff with a probing touch. "Your salve," she decided. She sniffed her fingertips, winced, wiped them on the cloth. "And horse dung."

"Get off my bed," Michiru instructed immediately.

Haruka flushed. "Sorry," she muttered. She rose, knees knocking.

"You _idiot_—I was just—oogh! _Sit back down_." Michiru scowled and jerked her friend against the mattress. They bobbled; their shoulders brushed. Haruka's nose renewed its efforts. Red droplets pattered over the arm of Michiru's tunic and down her leggings too, and for a moment the smaller princess sawed her lip between anxious teeth and Haruka felt terrible, terrible, terrible.

Her own voice rang in her head, a stealthy whisper: _It's true, isn't it?_

Michiru left for the bathroom again. Upon her return, she settled between Haruka's knees and said, "Lean forward."

"What are you—"

"I'm washing your hair. Here." Michiru passed over a twist of cloth. "Hold this under your nose, all right?"

"Uhn," realized the taller girl. She dropped her head forward, stoppering the flow of blood with the plug of the cloth. Her fingers shook.

A comb, a cup, and a basin of hot water performed small miracles. When Michiru was finished, she wrapped a towel about Haruka's faintly steaming skull and approved, "Sit up straight—yes. There. It's not perfect, but it's better." She reached for the sopping cloth beneath her friend's nose. "Let me have this."

"It's still bleeding," Haruka remonstrated, muffled.

"I'm going to fix that. Ssh. Give it."

Haruka did. Tipping her head back with two insistent fingers, Michiru took hold of the blonde's nose in a sudden fist. Haruka's eyes widened. "Sorry," Michiru whispered, and she really was—but she squeezed the other royal's nose anyway.

It crunched horrifically back into place. The wearing thread of Haruka's consciousness snapped in half and she fell into soft, fuzzy blackness.

When she woke again some odd seconds later, her face was in Michiru's shoulder and the other princess had quivery arms noosed around her, supporting her in a faint lean still against the edge of the bed. The gout beneath her nostrils now a hair-thin trickle, Haruka managed, "Thank you." It came out _dank 'oo_.

"I'm sorry," Michiru repeated. Nudging Haruka aright, she surveyed her handiwork and admitted, blinking away quick tears, "It's still a little crooked."

"It'll just make me more handsome," Haruka soothed the other princess. "It's fine. Charming, I bet."

Michiru reached up once more. "I could—"

Haruka captured the questing hand. Pressing her thumb in a gentle plea over the paler fingers beneath her own, she appealed, "Michiru? It's _fine_. Really."

Michiru frowned, thought about it—relented. "All right." Lifting a clean cloth from the stack at her hip, she murmured, "At least let me wash your face."

Haruka eyed the smaller princess dubiously.

Rolling her gaze heavenward, Michiru promised, "I won't touch your nose again."

Haruka nodded. Permission thus granted, Michiru set about wiping away the grime and grunge from the opposing countenance, lip bitten, touch cautious. Haruka did her best to bear it with a soldier's stolid stoicism. They both provided the occasional wince.

"So," Michiru ventured when she had only half an eyebrow and a cheekbone to go, "are you going to tell me why you got into fisticuffs with a stable boy, or am I going to have to go ask him personally?"

Dread pooled and burned in Haruka's chest. Watching Michiru through the wet scatter of her forelocks, she confessed, "You'll find out soon anyway. He—he's going to spread rumors about you."

"Me?" voiced Michiru, puzzled. She drew the cloth back, dropped it into the gritty basin. She pronounced Haruka, "Clean. Your nose isn't bleeding anymore either." Rocking to her feet, she gathered her supplies to carry them to the bureau: the soiled wipes went the way of the laundry, tossed therein by a talented hand. She shot her friend a smile over a shoulder as she began to pluck away her own dirty clothes. "What sort of rumors? A few more won't matter—there's plenty already. There's a particularly _fascinating _one about a third breast I supposedly ha—"

"It's not like that," Haruka put in quickly. Color railroaded into her cheeks, made her head dizzily pound. She finished, reluctant, "I guess it's more about… us."

"Mm?" Turning her back to Haruka, Michiru stripped her tunic from her torso and flung it aside. The sinful curve of her alabaster spine did nothing to alleviate the taller girl's blush. "Us?"

"Yeah," Haruka said. "About us. To. Uhm. Together."

"How is that a rumor? We're together all the time."

Michiru wet a handtowel and ran it down her arm. Moisture glittered in the faint, fine hairs there. Haruka felt pieces of herself shudder at the sight, and she thought miserably, _It's true, isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it?_

"Together," she repeated. Her heartbeat sounded abnormally loud in her ears, and she noted as she clenched her hands in her lap that her palms were sweating. "_Together_-together."

Michiru paused. She blinked, turned her face where Haruka could no longer see it. "Oh?" she ventured. She smoothed the handtowel down her other arm. Goosebumps rose in its wake—though on Haruka's flesh instead.

"Yeah. He, uhm—"

"You know," Michiru cut in, slowly suspicious, "I have to wonder why you went to see him in the first place."

"You, he, uh," Haruka floundered. She stiffened. "Speaking of wondering things," she defended, "I've been trying to figure out how _you _ended up there. Were _you _going to see him?" She hated herself for asking. The thought cut up her insides.

"Not even. I was following you," Michiru said shamelessly. She turned sideways, wringing out the towel over the basin. "I waited across the courtyard for ages for you to come back out of the stables. The lunch hour was nearly over when I went in and found you two fighting. I was _going_," she muttered petulantly, "to haul you back to lessons before you got in trouble for being late. Pardon my concern."

"So you weren't going to see him?" Haruka felt a sudden need to clarify this.

Michiru afforded her a severe frown in response. "No, for heaven's sake! Why would I go to see him at all?"

"Apparently you've done it before!" Haruka snapped before she could cloister the words.

Michiru stared at her. A telling curtained flush swept her cheeks, turned them a blotchy, mortified pink. The handtowel dropped from nerveless fingers. Her lips parted, but she bit them shut again and folded her hand over them. She began to shiver: faintly, fleeting. Whether from shock or sorrow or fury Haruka couldn't tell. "Oh," Michiru understood. Her eyes leapt to the corner of the mattress and back again, a second's clear betrayal.

"I was just making the bed," Haruka whispered. She looked down at her lap, the bridge of her nose burning both from its wounds and internal woe. "I—I wanted you to hurry up and come to breakfast with me. Not even because of the honey-rolls. Just because I don't like being there without you, it's too quiet… with all the people moving around, and trays crashing, yeah, that doesn't matter, it's still just not right when you're not there, so I thought, sure. Making the bed. That will put her with me faster."

She stopped. She was saying more than she wanted, more than she had ever considered or mulled over or mused about, but the normally dry well of words in her flooded over and she went on, unable to help it:

"I went to tuck in the sheet and I felt the book, and I… I took it out, and I read a little, and then I read some more, and I found what you said about how you go to look at him." A knife in her stomach, rending, slicing it open. She sniffed. Her sinuses screamed and wetness pricked the corners of her eyes, commiserative. "His hands," she forced out. "His stupid hands."

"Haruka—"

"And his _hair_, and he's _tall_, but the hands—you like those the best, right? They make you think of f… forbidden things." The wetness in her eyes spread to cover her whole gaze. She blinked furiously, reached up to wipe at it: her fingers came away salty and she thrust them under a thigh, horrified, shamed.

"I," she choked, "I… I went to look at him because I wanted to see for myself what made him so special. What made him good enough for you."

"Haruka," Michiru attempted again. She stepped forward. Haruka saw her feet, looked up a little: but ultimately she lowered her gaze and kept her contest with the floor. Her eyes streamed. Her heart clenched in her chest.

_It's true, isn't it? _

She licked her lips and thought, _I wish it were._

She said aloud, certain her words would cleave away her best friend, powerless to stop them even so: "I wanted to be good enough too."

A sharp intake of breath. Michiru took a step away, two, three, each one cutting chasms in Haruka's vulnerable soul. The blonde princess wrapped her arms about herself. She attempted to rationalize a life of mornings wherein breakfasts were eaten alone, sausage forever unsnitched, honey-rolls unshared. It was a terrible thing.

But then Michiru slipped sidelong and bent to tear the diary from beneath the mattress. "You idiot," she accused Haruka as she groped for it. Her words went watery. "You stupid, big, fat, unforgivable _idiot_! Did you even—agh!" She found the diary, jerked it to light. She sat down on the bed next to Haruka and began to flip through it. Pages flapped, sending an explosion of jeweled dust motes up into the surrounding sunlight. "Did you even _finish_ reading what I wrote?"

"What do you mea—"

"_Honestly_." Michiru found the entry she wanted, marked it with a finger. She turned her gaze up to Haruka. It was a tsunami of tears and gale-green sweetness. "If you can't _thoroughly _rifle through other people's hidden hearts, don't do it at all, Haruka. Come on."

"What—"

"Shut up," Michiru ordered her. She hit the other princess with the spine of the diary. "Just shut up, you—you! God, you _idiot_. Just. Just _listen_." She opened the small book to the marked page, held it up, and took a deep breath. " 'Sometimes I go down just to look at him,' " she began. Haruka jerked, but Michiru reached out abruptly and laced her fingers through the taller girl's. Haruka started. Michiru hesitated—her chest hitched. She continued, weak, eyes drifting between the page and her friend's face, " '…and I watch his hair in the sunlight…' "

Her fingers tightened. She clung to Haruka. Haruka clung back.

" 'But especially I watch those hands of his,' " Michiru read, and her voice dipped, dangerous, wobbling, " 'and I think…' "

Haruka waited, and Michiru struggled, and they both felt fear, but in the press of their palms they felt something else too, and so the smaller princess finished,

" '…I think if… if only they were _Haruka's_ hands instead.' "

Michiru fell quiet. She snapped the diary shut. She threw it vehemently against the far wall. "Idiot," she told Haruka again. Her tone lacked conviction, and her fingers squeezed Haruka's so hard that both their knuckles gleamed bone white.

Haruka watched their twined hands. She watched them a long time. Finally she drew them up, and Michiru looked sideways, shy and startled, as Haruka dropped a kiss on the crease of her friend's thumb.

"What does this mean?" Haruka asked, hoarse.

Michiru sighed. She stretched a little—she shifted. Their legs tangled. Michiru's feet hung at Haruka's ankles. Pressing her free hand over the blonde's taut thigh, Michiru arched and feathered her lips against Haruka's wounded, wondering mouth and smiled.


	3. Chapter Three:  Head Games

**Warning: **This story implies the eventual involvement of two women together. Don't like? Don't read. Beware also minor amounts of cursing.

**Commentary: **I owe tons of gratitude to **lostinhersong**, **Fuseki**, **marine cathedral**, and my unsung, unspecified hero for tolerating me as I worked my way through this chapter—for listening to me ramble, rant, rave, and whine. For reading bits of this. For telling me I could do this. For telling me I _should _do this. Thank you all—so, so much.

This is the story of Haruka, Michiru, and their relationship as it evolved during the Silver Millennium. I intended them to be fifteen years old here, give or take a few months. Whether or not that works is up to you, readers.

I originally didn't intend this story to be even this long, so its eventual breadth is unknown. If you like it enough to see it persist, the best way to have that happen is to **let me know**!

To all of you who read, review, message, question, critique, and encourage me: thank you so much. Please continue to do so.

As always, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

**Disclaimer: **I do not own the BSSM franchise. It belongs to the goddess Takeuchi Naoko.

* * *

_So the way you act  
Is it just an act to some strange courtship ritual  
A habitual nervous reaction  
Hey it's just me, set yourself free  
Why don't you let me know what's goin' on  
Inside your cluttered head_

—Eve 6, "Jet Pack"

**CHAPTER THREE: Head Games **

Sleeping with a broken nose and three cracked ribs, Haruka discovered, mostly meant not sleeping at all.

She was used to spending her nights on her belly, face tucked firmly onto her arms, sheets thrown askew: not with a stack of pillows behind her head, a brace on her nose, and what felt like a million mint-bitter ants crawling through prickle-patter tunnels above her lungs. Her shattered sinuses hated her and took every opportunity to demonstrate their displeasure—they clogged, they drained, they turned her breathing into the practice sessions of a ragged round of tin-whistlers. Her chest itched and throbbed. Her abdomen, bruised like a broken melon, somersaulted with every minor shift or stretch. When she did manage to drift off, she soon woke herself up with the horrific rippling roars of her own snores.

The healer called it a deviated septum. Michiru, whose room was just a door over from Haruka's, called it a one-man band.

Haruka called it a pain in the ass.

She stared now at the backside of three in the morning, her body all one tired ache and her mind a gunning snaptrap. A heavy summer rain lobbed its levees against her room's window-wells. Lightning sent snickering shadows scurrying over the walls and floors, a thousand whitewall whispers; its thunder-brother growled and muttered in the sky's eaves. Eclipsed from dreams, her hands folded into a teepee along the beams of her collarbones, Haruka listened to the storm sing and thought about Michiru.

Two days since reading the resident royal's diary. Two days since the advent of jealousy and protectiveness and creeping possession, all fruits of a thorny blue-blossom vine winding its way tighter and tighter about Haruka's heart. Two days since the broken nose. Two days since that broken nose had started to make everything taste different, even her beloved honey-rolls.

Two days since sitting on Michiru's bed together, the knot of their hands a twisted tie between them. Two days since tears on both their faces, running down cheeks and chins in warm, weary rivulets. Two days since the shutter-snap of sunlight across Michiru's hair. Two days since the coil of her fingers over flesh and the surge of their souls and that soft press—that… that…

Two days since the kiss.

Haruka ran her thumbs together. She unhooked her other fingers, lifted them a little, rubbed them lightly over the split skin of her mouth.

Two days.

Since the kiss.

She groaned. She turned her head sideways on the pillow, barked her sore nose in its damnable brace, and jerked her eyes ceilingward once more. Her heart jogged between the pulse of the raindrops on the citadel's stonework. Somewhere out in the great yawning wetness, one of Triton's famous crystalline clocktowers sobbed a quarter past the hour.

The kiss.

Haruka puckered her frown against her palm and sighed. It _had _been a kiss: of that there was no question. Though she was by no means an expert in the sacred art of the embrace, there were rationally only so many things two sets of lips could do—could _mean_—when pressed together. Wasn't that right? Wasn't that fair? Huffing, she raked her blunt fingernails gingerly down her face, skipping over the more bruised bits of it, and squeezed her eyes shut.

…the _kiss_.

They were the same and they weren't. They still ate breakfast together—twice, yes, since then—and they still trained together and even walked together too before they parted in the afternoons for their own separate studies, Haruka to swordplay and Michiru to scrying. They still met at eventide to trickle into the mess for the day's last meal, and they still rubbed elbows in practicing their lessons in the draw of the day toward bedtime, their papers scattered across Michiru's floor, the scritch of their pencils and their woeful sighs the true melody of their methods.

Yet, for two best friends who shared so much, they had neither of them thought to mention the thing from two days ago that had changed their lives forever.

Haruka groaned again, softer this time. She fastened her nails between her teeth and nibbled them miserably. It had changed _her_ life, anyway, that small brush of mouths between herself and Michiru. She was able now to admit in her own mind that what she felt for the other princess was deeper and dearer than mere sisterly love, a nameless but certain entity with its aquamarine stamp inked squarely upon her heart. She could, in these late storm-riddled hours when time crept and her healing bones creaked and the sky fell down, conceive of something special between them.

"So why," she muttered to herself, her voice a low rasp beneath the hiss of the rain, "haven't I said anything about it?"

She paused. She chewed her lip. She wondered next: "Why hasn't _she _said anything about it?"

She sat up in bed. The sheets fell in a bleak blue puddle over her legs; the bared skin of her torso prickled in the room's humid chill. Drawing in a long, slow breath, she let it out in a sluggish stream, flexed her hands, and dropped her face into them. Her nose twinged angrily, but she ignored it. "What shit," she muttered. The lament bounced around the closed canyon of her palms. "What stupid, stupid shit."

"Haruka?" A hushed question suddenly, like a finger in the dark.

The blonde lifted her head. Her shaggy cowlicks bristled. Her eyes strained across the chamber's dim expanse to the entrydoor: to the line beneath it, normally a faint film of torchlight. Shadows shifted there now instead, evidence of a visitor's feet. "Haah?" she asked.

"Haruka?" Again, followed by a familiar knock this time. "Are you awake? May I come in?"

Lightning lit up the room and Haruka's smile helped. "Yeah," she said, "yeah, sure. I'm awake. Come in."

The doorknob spun. The barricade swung open, admitted a waif in a white nightshirt, and fell back into the jamb amidst a rumble of disgruntled thunder. Michiru leaned against it. Her sleeves billowed and she executed a small curtsy to her fellow royal, the glitter of her hair all the sea's secrets and more. "Pardon," she hissed. She danced hopefully from foot to foot, bit her lip. "The floor's cold," she said.

"Is it?" Haruka blinked, feigning surprise. She looked away, inventing an abrupt interest in the windows. "That's a pity."

"Don't be mean," Michiru scolded. "Invite me over!"

"Hm, I don't know," hemmed the taller princess. She pretended to study her savaged nails. "Maybe if I don't, it'll teach you to put on your stockings before you get out of bed."

"Maybe if you don't," Michiru threatened, "I'll go back to that bed and I won't talk to you at _all_. Since you're being a _jerk_." But she was smiling even as she said it, worrying her feet over the flagstone toward her friend and the pedestal upon which the blonde so proudly perched.

"Hmph," Haruka replied. Drawing the sheets back a little, she patted the mattress at her hip and wiggled her fingers. "Get over here, chilly-feet."

Michiru grinned. Victorious, she bounded over the remainder of the room and launched herself into Haruka's bed. The mattress bounced them together, made their shoulders and stomachs bump—Haruka _uff_ed her startlement and Michiru giggled, throwing her arms around the taller girl. Tucking her cheek against Haruka's shoulder, Michiru wriggled happily into her friend's side and demanded, imperious, "Robe me."

Rolling her eyes, Haruka wrapped the two of them in a sari of sheets. Smoothing them down Michiru's spine, she asked, "Better?"

Michiru shivered, thought about it. Haruka felt the pooch of the smaller girl's lip against her flesh and smirked. "Almost," Michiru allowed.

"Almost?"

"Mmhm. Lift your legs a little."

"What?"

"Do it," Michiru insisted. "Come on."

Arching a golden brow, Haruka did. The smaller princess gleefully slid her feet into the slot beneath the other royal's knees. Haruka jerked, swore. "God! They're like ice!"

"You," sighed Michiru, "are a _furnace_. It's _wonderful_."

"Your toes are tiny cubes of frigid _death_."

Michiru wiggled them. "Mmm. Not for much longer, hey?" She tightened her arms. She thrust her face deeper into Haruka's shoulder, and the stub of her nose against the blonde's collar was nearly as cold as her feet. Her breath puffed. She smelled of white soap and softness, and her curls trickled in silken tresses down the divot of Haruka's throat, and she looked into the small seam between them and said, "Wow, Haruka."

"Nnm?"

"You really _are _flat," Michiru observed.

"Oi!"

"No. No. You _are_." Michiru lowered her arms, braced her hands on the other girl's hips beneath the sheets. "Here, bounce for me. I want to see if you jiggle at all."

"It's—what—_jiggle_?" Haruka's cheeks turned into red lamplights in the dark.

"That's right. Bounce!"

"_No_."

"Fine! I'll bounce for you." Michiru's fingers flexed and she rocked on the bed, sending ripples through the springy mattress. Before Haruka could even begin to think of flailing away, the other noble giggled and whispered, "Flat as a board, Haruka. Not even the smallest little—"

"This is important _why_?" Haruka queried. She hid her blazing face in Michiru's hair.

"Because you blushing makes you even warmer," Michiru relayed, satisfied. She turned her face up. Haruka blinked and her lashes brushed Michiru's brow, and their cheeks scrubbed, and then their lips met and Michiru lifted a hand to curl it in Haruka's hair. She pulled the blonde closer. Haruka went willingly.

They parted eventually with a soft smacking sound and stuttering breathlessness. The rain tapped; thunder snarled in a sibilant slur and Michiru's fingers folded in the short, fine locks just behind Haruka's ear. "Oh," she gasped, and went on, "oh—_oh_. Was that—was that weird?"

"You taste like mints," Haruka said quietly. She licked her lips. She liked mints.

"It's toothpaste," Michiru supplied. They looked at each other as best they could in the room's frail, staggered light. Michiru's cheeks darkened. She ran her thumb over the shell of Haruka's ear. Silent, spellbound, the taller girl pressed into her touch. Michiru rejoined finally, "You—you taste like cinnamon."

"Also toothpaste," Haruka managed. Because she felt the sudden need to, she splayed her hand in the small of Michiru's back. The other royal's nightshirt slithered under her fingers, and Michiru's spine made the faintest arc up into them.

Lightning flashed again, filling the room with a sharp, shining luster unmatched by the rising realization between the two friends pressed so near.

Michiru tugged the handful of hair in her possession. It was a sweet, shy thing. "I like cinnamon," she offered, and she watched Haruka through the slanted shutter of her lashes.

Swallowing hard, Haruka stared down at the smaller princess. Heat fanned and flared over her face and her heart struggled into her throat; knots wove tapestries in the pit of her belly. Still, she knew what she wanted, and she dropped her head slowly into the shivery separation between them and whispered, "I like mints more."

Her smile found Michiru's, simple. She lifted her hands from the flaps of the sheets and cupped her friend's face in them—worried her fingers over pale cheeks and the lightning's scissor-shadows there. Michiru's lips parted and their teeth clicked and there was warm wetness, just a little, and Haruka ran her tongue out to taste it.

Michiru squeaked, jerked back, clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes went wide as dinner plates in the dark. "Was that your—your—"

"Mmhm," Haruka said. She traced her thumb over Michiru's fingertips, peeled them away. "It was," she confirmed, and finished, "so's this." She caught Michiru's mouth again, firmer this time. Michiru trembled—sank against her. Let her. Liked it.

They pulled back as one, overwhelmed. Michiru fit her face to the well of Haruka's throat. The taller princess pressed her lips wordlessly to the other girl's temple. The storm's surge slipped and giggled in the gutters. The soughing southern wind off the cape slapped stippled waves of rain into the palace's walls. The impacts of those waves, intermittent, were like muffled chimes of the citadel's morning-prayer gongs.

"Was that weird?" Haruka echoed. She slid her hands back into Michiru's hair and let them rest so, submerged in the ocean of seaweed-green tresses. The owner of said tresses dipped her head down to permit the intrusion.

"Very weird," Michiru agreed. She dug her feet deeper beneath Haruka's legs. She licked her lips and Haruka felt it, and they both flushed a bit more. Their hearts raced, one pattering between the beats of the other. Haruka's was faster, frenetic.

"What is this?" the blonde voiced.

"This?" Michiru volleyed the word back to its mistress.

"This." Haruka caught it. She rocked the two of them together for emphasis. "Us."

Michiru paused—giggled. "You _do _jiggle," she observed. "Just a smidge." But her forehead wrinkled as she frowned, and she hooked her arms about the other princess and murmured, "This _is _us, Haruka."

"Don't be cryptic," Haruka pleaded. "You know I failed my scrying course. I even dropped and stepped on the mirror. And I swallowed the tea leaves."

"You didn't _step _on the mirror," scolded Michiru. "You stomped on it. I saw you."

"…well. _Dropping _it was an accident." Haruka leaned back a little, found Michiru's eyes. "I'm serious," she asserted. "What is this? What—what do you want?"

The other princess narrowed her brilliant gaze. She huffed. She curled a hand into a fist: she sent it hurtling gently into the soft, bruised meat of Haruka's stomach. Stunned, the blonde doubled over, writhing. Michiru took the opportunity to nudge Haruka shamelessly back into her small mountain of pillows. She straddled the available lap and hissed, furious, staring down into her friend's shocked face, "Really?"

"…uu!" whimpered Haruka.

Michiru slammed her hand down into the pillow just next to Haruka's cheek. Her eyes sparked. Lightning pooled in the dimples of her cheeks, ran away again. "How can you ask me that?" she demanded. Her knees dug into the mattress on either side of Haruka's hips, insistent. The pinned princess could barely breathe. "How?"

Haruka folded her hands over Michiru's thighs, pushed at them weakly. "…please," she requested.

Michiru looked down, sighed, and shifted backward over Haruka's legs. Strained stomach no longer compressed, the taller girl sucked in a pained gulp of air, held it, blinked away inadvertent tears. Her nose burned. Her ribs screamed. They locked eyes, and Haruka saw through the filmy haze of her vision that Michiru was nearly crying too.

Reaching out, Michiru rubbed an apologetic hand over Haruka's throbbing belly. Like her feet, her fingers were cold. They felt wicked—they felt wonderful. Haruka shivered. She dropped her hand over Michiru's and they clutched at one another, and for a while they rested thus, Haruka's breathing staggered, Michiru's indignation stalled beneath the other girl's hoarse pants.

When Haruka's distress had calmed somewhat, Michiru stated, "I can't believe you." The quick fury on her features put the ferocity of the storm outside to shame. "I'm not _half_ as hard to read as a scry-mirror or tealeaves, not for you." She took her hand back, indicated herself in a near-desperate sweep. "Look at me, Haruka, please. _Look _at me. Scry me. Read me—I mean, you do it all the time anyway. Read—read _between _the lines. My lines."

Wedging an elbow into the pillow-stack to prop herself aright, Haruka tried. She saw a princess awash in stormlight and navy-hued bedsheets. She saw her best friend close to tears, ivory knees knocking her own bronze ones, nightshirt a ruin of ripple-wrinkles and twisted lace. She saw ruddy cheeks and a bitten lip—_mints_—and quicksilver-sudden curls and—

"No," Michiru whispered, scolding. She stretched her hand across the sheets and its arrownine shadow knifed along beneath it, dark waters drowning a darker thing. Her fingernails scritched under Haruka's chin, cupped it, cradled it. "No, no," she corrected. Her eyes took Haruka's and there was a connection between them, a thing like a thread drawn tight. Haruka wound herself down that thread's low spool. They fell together into the sea-soul of their bond, and the taller girl distantly heard Michiru demand, "Look deep. Look at _me_."

Haruka looked. Saw. Remembered:

_Eight years old, running pell-mell perilous behind Michiru across the bridge between the citadel and the palace greenhouses. They are free from lessons for the day—they are racing. The _gweeping _chorus of the frogs thunders around them. A fine drizzle dances down from low-hanging platinum clouds, fuzzing their whole world soft and slippery, and Michiru shouts back to Haruka in a trill, "I'm going to win!"_

Of course you are_, Haruka thinks. _I'm going to let you. _She doesn't mind this loss, though, because it is to Michiru, and Michiru will laugh and smile and tease Haruka about her fat slow legs and not mean a word of it and well, it's not really losing, is it, if they're both happy?_

_The planks beneath their feet creak and groan pure protest, and one is just too rotten. It gives way under Haruka's booted toes. She staggers forward with a yelp and Michiru turns immediately, concerned. Her pause promises wreckage. They crash into each other. Michiru loses her footing too because the bridge is so slick-smooth and they are falling, falling out into the open air beyond the walkway, and Michiru cries out—_

_Haruka curls her arms protectively about the plummeting princess. They spin. They land, a bonded bullet, in the stream below the bridge: or rather, Michiru lands on top of Haruka. The blonde girl gets a crown of mudscum and slime for her efforts. Michiru, cushioned so by her friend's bony butt, barely gets wet._

_Michiru helps Haruka to her feet and they stand in the swirling water, submerged to the knee. The smaller princess plucks a glob of unidentifiable nast from Haruka's hair and tells her solemnly, "I'm still going to win."_

_Her eyes shine with the laughter Haruka wanted for her loss, and there is shameless adoration in them too. _

The rain roared in the eaves. Haruka blinked, surfaced, jerked—but Michiru was there, too close and too loved to deny. Her arms dropped into a ring about the blonde princess, a tugging life preserver. "You saw?" Michiru asked. "The bridge? That disgusting stuff in your hair and—"

"I saw—us," Haruka attempted. "Not just you. Both of us. That's not scrying, Michiru." She shivered, at once enraptured and instinctively afraid. "That's something else," she whispered. "That's _sharing_. That's—"

"A memory collision," soothed the smaller girl. "Yours fill in the gaps in mine and vice versa." She swatted Haruka's hip. "You're not nearly as bad at this as you said! Scry-flunkies aren't supposed to be able to _do _that!"

"I failed the course! I did!" Haruka disputed indignantly. "I have the marks to prove it! And the tea I had to buy for the lessons. _Packages _of it. I tried to pawn it off on Rei the last time she visited, but she wouldn't take it. She said it smelled like rat ass."

"She said no such thing!" Michiru denied, delighted and horrified at once. "Not Rei!"

"She absolutely did. I bring out the beast in her verbiage. Talent—I have it."

"Some might call that _corruption_." Michiru rolled her eyes. Her palms slid across Haruka's elbows. "That was good, but too shallow," she said, and insisted, "read deeper." She found Haruka's eyes. She requested, "Can you?"

Haruka could. She drowned in Michiru's gaze: fell beneath the waves there, surrendered. She looked a second time. Saw. Remembered:

_Ten years old, give or take a few months. It is the dead of winter at the Miranda citadel and Haruka returns from her swordplay lessons caked in dust and sweat and silt-snow off the desert, shivering hard beneath her layers, her breath's ice-sheaf crusted beneath her nostrils. She rubs it away, looks up to see a winded servant rushing toward her. She salutes him and smiles, but that expression fades as he drops his face to hers and tells her, hoarse, hushed, that weeping words and terrible tidings have come from Neptune._

_The High Queen has died. Michiru's mother. A week ago._

_Haruka's sword clatters from her fingers. She leaves it lying there in the hall—it is the only time in her life she will ever neglect her equipment—and races for the special portals in the base chambers of the palace. They require copious amounts of energy to activate, and one usage will wipe out electricity at the core of the Mirandan city for several hours at minimum. The portals are for emergencies only. They are for the passage of sailor soldiers between worlds during times of war, especially._

_The war in Haruka's heart is emergency enough, she thinks, and because of the slowness of the light-shuttles that brought the terrible news, she has already lost a week. She reaches the room where the portals are housed. She barricades the door first. The servants are sure to have given chase—she has beaten them here, yes, but she will not be alone long. _

_Approaching the first queer tube, she feathers her fingers over the surface and says, "Neptune." She thinks of Michiru's mother: the kind, high-minded woman who never scolded the two children when she caught them creeping, filthy and giggling, into her rooms to toy with her _henshin _stick. The graceful, giving queen who took Haruka's hand once at a party—when Michiru was sick in bed with a cold, no less, leaving the blonde royal terribly, awkwardly alone—and asked, "May I have this dance, young prince, since my daughter isn't here to hoard them all?" And they did dance together, slow and sweeping and sincere, and Michiru's mother gave Haruka a kiss at the end of it—right between the eyes!—that turned the visiting girl's insides into shivery-golden glee. _

_Haruka thinks of the queen, oh yes, and remembers finally how, just the year prior, she called Haruka to her bedside one evening at the end of dinner. Haruka went to her and touched the monarch's perspiring brow, her lips bitten, her fingers nervous. Michiru's mother comforted her: caught her hand, kept it. Her touch was so like Michiru's that Haruka shivered. The queen held fast to her fingertips for a long time, neither of them speaking until, just before the eldest royal fell asleep, she turned her head on her pillow in its nest of kelp-curls and whispered, "Your mother used to hold my hand this way." And then, "Thank you for being even a little like her, Haruka. My daughter has such fortune in a love like you."_

"_Neptune," Haruka orders again. Her mouth wobbles; so does her voice. "Neptune! _NEPTUNE!"

_The tube beneath her fingers gives way, amniotic. It allows her passage. She steps into it and feels abruptly torn in twain: like she is being taken apart and put together again over and over, each time the wrong way. Her stomach heaves and her mouth drops open and she screams out in the silent vacuum of space, all the while thinking NEPTUNE-NEPTUNE-NEPTUNE and beneath that, in her heart's voice, MICHIRU-MICHIRU-MICHIRU—_

_She hits foreign flagstone on her knees. She retches. All the hair on her head stands up in a burnished bronze bristle. Through watering eyes she sees a ring of soldiers surround her, immediate and shocked and questioning her presence in loud, looming voices. Mostly she doesn't care, though, because their knee-guards are cut with a signature weave-wave design, and that design tells her she has reached her destination. Only Neptunian soldiers, after all, wear such a sigma._

_Staggering to her feet, she knocks her brow against the nearest soldier's chestplate, throws up on him for good measure, and leaves him contemplating her lunch as she wobbles from the room and up the staircase to the palace proper. She has the headache of all headaches pounding its menace-mallets between her temples. Her joints scream and her belly heaves again, and then a third time, and as she finally reaches the top of the stairs, something in her sinuses bursts and sends thread-thin pink trickles running from her nostrils._

_Pressure-sick and stomach-splinched, she nevertheless makes her way out into the courtyard above the portal-chamber. It is raining: a cold, bitter downpour that soaks her instantly. Her hair plasters itself to her skull. Her clothes stick to her and her practice padding squelches and she sheds it right there, careless. When the soldiers find it minutes later, it is already a sodden marshmallow-mound ruin._

_Haruka is not aware of how long it takes her to walk to the beach. It feels like years, and she is shivering so hard by the time she reaches the first small-swell dunes that her world looks like an earthquake's insides. She struggles through the saw-grass, sheets of rain slamming down her spine and hammering her shoulders. They berate her lateness. They urge her forward. She stops only to throw up once more, hands clamped over her knees. Her legs buckle and bend, traitorous, and she knows that if she falls now, she won't be able to get up again._

_Faced with such knowledge, she simply doesn't fall._

_The beach rolls out before her, a white-capped wreck of winter winds and frost-stiffened sand. Beyond that is the ocean, of course, and Neptune's whole navy bobs on its harassed waves, their colors up, their silver at full salute. She steps from the cup of the dunes just in time to see-hear-feel the cannons fire. _

UH-CHOOM. _The sound—is it a sound? It seems bigger, like a world breaking, and can a world break with something as simple as a sound?—tears into her. She snarls: she rocks and sways and her footing nearly comes undone. Brightspot specks swarm over her vision and she is just about to give in to them, to drop it all and go sprawling facedown into the sand, but then she catches sight of Michiru and there is no question that she must—_

_Keep—_

_Walking—_

_The surf sucks abruptly at her ankles. She pushes out her arms before her, reaching for the figure of her best friend in the shallows of the rollicking sea. She touches Michiru's shoulders. She grasps them. She jerks Michiru back into the curve of her body in the sobbing seep of the thick ropy rain, trying to shield her from it, from the wind, from the waves, from the burial ceremony happening out on the horizon. She succeeds at none of these things. It is impossible._

_Michiru turns sideways a little. She sags into Haruka's touch. She looks up, surprised, and her mouth parts—Haruka imagines she's saying, "Oh!"—and the cannons fire again._

UH-CHOOM.

_They close their eyes together in the center of the terrible world-rending thing, sharing a wince, a cleave-deep wound, a loss. The sea roars and surges and slaps at them, and Michiru's hand curls like a vise in Haruka's sodden tunic, and Haruka tightens her arms, and it is only the ties they twist about one another that keep either of them from washing away._

_Over and over the cannons sound their crashing clarion. When they fall quiet at last and the queen has been laid to rest in the ocean from which legends say her mermaid ancestors rose, Haruka and Michiru stumble back to the beach's soaked sand and sink there. They are drenched. They are wretched. They hurt._

_Haruka throws up one more time, and though Michiru is the bereaved part of their pair, it is she who holds Haruka's head and strokes her neck and tells her it will be all right._

_The sea calms. The ships scud back into the harbor single file, their sails sending sharp _whtt-whtt _flapping noises over the waves. The wind blows itself out, but the rain continues and Haruka sits up, and Michiru leans into her, hiding, to cry. She does it strangely, without sobs or sniffles or snide comments about the way fate works. She stares at the ocean, her eyes wide enough to drown even that great cup of water, tears dripping from their corners like wax drips from burning candles. She clings to Haruka and finally she whispers, "When someone you love leaves, it's terrible."_

_The understatement is somehow fitting. Haruka believes Michiru's mother might have laughed at it a little bit, and Michiru must think so too, because they both smile, wry wrinkles on their rain-washed faces. They look at each other. Haruka reaches down between them and takes Michiru's hand. Michiru squeezes her fingers. _

_Haruka thinks to ask, "Why weren't you out with the fleet? Didn't you want to—to see her? One more time?"_

_Michiru's mouth wobbles. She nods. She bites her lips so hard that the next day they are swollen, and she shuffles sideways, burying herself deeper in Haruka's shadow. She tells her friend, "Of course. But—but I knew you. _You. _I knew you'd come because you _always _come to me, and I wanted to—"_

_She chokes. She flails out, hitting the blonde's knee and the wet sand. She is angry and stricken and Haruka turns to her, understanding, and Michiru pummels the taller girl with her little hammer-firm fists. Haruka lets her, lets her, lets her until Michiru has worn herself into a trembling kind of satisfaction._

_Michiru turns her face up and finishes, "I knew you'd come and you—you can't _swim_, Haruka, and I knew you'd try anyway, and I—I wanted to see you more than I wan—"_

Haruka gasped. She blinked and Michiru did too, and they were both leaking without meaning to at all, hot tears that flashed whitebright in the lightning's sizzling scatters. Michiru's nails dug accusingly into Haruka's cheeks. She hissed, half-weeping, "I think you only failed that scrying course because you were lazy, you jerk. You _deserve _rat ass tea!" She swallowed. She coughed, "You're—you're way too good at that. Oh. _Oh_, I can still feel the _sand_—"

"You said to read! You—you said to look deeper and I _did_," Haruka defended. Her voice broke. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bring all of that back—"

"No. No, stop it. I let you. I _let you_. Don't you dare cry, you idiot, I can't—"

"_You're_ crying!"

"I'm _allowed_!"

"Why am I not, then?" Haruka attempted a sniffle, partly for theatrics and partly because she _did _want to cry. Her nose throbbed, reminding her of its grievously maimed state. She swore instead.

"Because of that," Michiru stated. The words came out both water-wibble haughty and amused. "Princes don't cry, you see? They curse." She dropped her hands across Haruka's shoulders and let them curl there, her thumbs tucked in the divots of the other girl's collar. She thrust her face to Haruka's: peppered kisses over it, chased away its salt trails and shameful smearings. She nibbled the tip of her friend's nose and Haruka growled another oath, softer this time. Michiru caught her mouth in the midst of her mutter.

"My prince," she breathed, "don't cry, okay?" and she stole Haruka's small shivering smile, just to make sure those orders were carried out properly.

That kiss ceded into another, and then one more. Haruka sought to make it an even four—just to be consistent, really—when Michiru cupped her cheeks again, holding the two of them a breath apart. "I'm not crying," Haruka encouraged the other princess. And next, suggestive, "You can keep doing that. And I can keep—"

"Are you still wondering," Michiru interrupted, "what I want?"

"You seemed to like those well enough," Haruka opined.

Michiru flushed. She admitted, "I liked those a lot. But I mean—_Haruka_. Stop it." She pinched the taller girl's cheek, frowned seriously down into her unrepentant kiss-crushed face. Wind spluttered in the shutters, slammed them against the citadel walls, and Michiru went on, "Are you wondering about it even a little bit?"

Haruka hesitated. She licked her lips, savoring the spearmint sear of her friend's taste there. She provided, "If I say yes, will you get angry again?"

Michiru sighed. She dropped her brow against Haruka's, and their foreheads afforded the room's stormy symphony an accessory _thock _of scudding skulls. "You are such a _moron_."

"_You _have an elbow in my boob. Are you enjoying that? Because I'm not. Could you maybe shift it a li—"

"You don't have boobs, Haruka. We've been through this." Michiru nevertheless moved the limb obligingly. She huffed into Haruka's temple, sending blonde locks scattering up and down again in a summerside puff. "Do you really not get it?" she demanded at length. "You don't see what I want from this? You don't—you don't know?"

Stuttered quiet fell, broken only by the branch-whip of thunder outside. "Wait," Haruka said. "My ribs hurt." She turned over onto her side, spilling Michiru back onto the mattress. The smaller princess made a sound of petulant protest. Her counterpart smoothed the sheets soothingly over them both, hiding the knot of their legs from even the room's scooped shadows. She eased to Michiru—Michiru slid closer. They met in the middle.

Michiru said, "Your pillows smell like sharpness, Haruka." She sounded pleased. She pressed, "Well?"

"Hold on a minute. I'm thinking."

"You're taking a long time to think about a simple question."

"It's because I don't want to hurt you," Haruka replied, and Michiru buttoned her lips. They waited: for the storm to pass. For each other, somehow—for realizations and epiphanies to happen in the dark. Haruka twitched her mouth into a low purse and managed, "I can hope about things. I can want them."

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly that. Like—I can _hope _you want what I do." She stopped. She chewed the inside of her cheek, ran her tongue along the seam of her teeth. "But," she put forward, "I'm _not _a prince, Michiru, not really. I wish—I wish I could be, for you. So one day we might…"

She trailed off. She started to say, _So one day we might be happy_, but that wasn't fair, wasn't quite right. They were already happy. She tried again and nearly voiced, _So one day we might be together_, but that didn't work either, because they were already together too and would be forever, bound as a team of sailor soldiers until their lives ran out. She fought with her words. Stupid, stupid words!

She found what she wanted finally, and she said, "So one day we might not be questioned."

"Questioned?" Michiru repeated. Her eyes widened with recognition and she whispered: "Oh, Haruka, you don't mean—"

"Yeah. Yeah, I do mean that."

"But—"

"No." Haruka sat up the tiniest bit. The sheets slid away from her again, skimmed the galaxy of bruises along her ribs and belly. "No, Michiru. Think for a minute. Think of what—what they could say. Our people. Our parents. The others too, even." This last thing fell to a whisper, a terrible burning prayer-pyre of potential hatred. "They could say it makes us weak. They could say it cripples our ability to fight—that we're useless unless we're together." She sucked in a breath, concluded heavily: "That we'll put each other first. Before—before Serenity."

Michiru inhaled too to reject the idea. Lightning-flickers filled the cavern of her mouth, flooded fluorescent rimes up over the water-well of her lips. She made a sound like withering—like _eeeehn_—when she realized the truth of her best friend's postulation. Still, she gathered herself and encouraged Haruka quietly, "It's just as possible they wouldn't do or say anything like that."

"Mm?" Haruka looked at Michiru sidelong in the shivery dark, dubious. She received an elbow in the ribs—on her good side, at least—for her skepticism.

"Don't be so negative. Give them some credit, Haruka. They _could _be completely supportive." Michiru hesitated. She offered next, "I'm pretty sure Minako has money on us, actually."

"_What_?"

"…and Rei. And Makoto, too." Michiru bit her lip. "And I overheard Serenity telling Ami that she was betting her favorite earrings on you, uhm—you. You _getting _me before the ceremonial solstice party at midseason. I thought she was talking about your chest catching up to mine, but in retrospect it seems more like…" She stopped. She looked up at Haruka. She giggled.

"Like they knew before I did," Haruka realized. She dropped her face into her palm, massaged the bridge of her nose in the movements of sheer habit. It crunched. She gagged and Michiru giggled again, louder this time. The storm's stirrings slipped away from the bright sound as shadows scurry from sunlight.

"_I _knew," Michiru said suddenly, imperious. She turned her head on Haruka's pillow and smirked. When she saw her friend's flush, however, she softened the smugness to a low smile and continued, "Well, I knew how_ I_ felt. And I…"

She stopped. She blinked. Haruka nudged their knees together beneath the sheets and urged, "What?"

"I guess it's the same as what you said earlier," Michiru mused. "I can hope you want what I do—or I could. I _did. _I hoped you wanted the same thing I wanted, in here." She tapped her chest with two fingers and considered the statement, rolling it around over her tongue. She ended, soft, "I hoped as hard as I could."

Haruka hedged, "Do you still?"

Michiru said nothing, but her mouth puckered and her chest heaved, soundless exasperation. She rolled onto her belly and buried her face in the available pillow. She ventured in the space between sepulchral thunder-snaps, the query muffled, muted, serious, "Haruka?"

"Mm?"

"Say Serenity and the others—your father, mine. Our people. I don't think they would or will, but… say they _did _question us."

"…yes?"

Michiru lifted her face from the pillow's plush confines. She dug her elbows into it instead, propped her chin in her hands. She gifted her gaze to the girl with whom she was brushing hips and wondered, ginger, "Would—would that stop you? Would you care?"

Haruka cocked her head. She rubbed her hands over the ridge of the sheets reflectively. "No. Yes," she returned.

"Now who's being cryptic?" Michiru scowled at her. "That was two answers. Don't try to tell me you're bad at sums—I cheated off you all last summer and got excellent scores."

"I _knew _it," Haruka exulted. She chuckled: the gray-stretch sincerity under her eyes, though, fell mirthless. "Two answers," she agreed, "to two questions."

"How—"

"I'd care. Of course I would. You're my best friend, but—" Haruka bit off the words, savaged them silently a moment. She spun her next sentence carefully. "I'd hate to lose them. I wouldn't like it if, because of the idea of us together, Makoto didn't come to spar with me sometimes. Or if Serenity did that little frown. You know, the one that makes her nose red. Like a berry-button." Michiru smiled. Haruka did too, and muttered, "Bitter medicine if… if my father looked at me with more disgust than he does already."

"It's not disgust, Haruka."

"Disappointment, then."

Michiru could say nothing to dispute that, so she offered instead, a furious whisper, "He's stupid. So, so stupid."

"Regardless." Haruka flicked her fingers in the lightning-stutter stillness. "Yes. It would bother me. I would care." Her voice hardened. "Even more—no, _especially _if you lost them too. Ami, for your ocean relays. Rei and your fashion deliberations. Your father. He's—he's so proud of you, and if he suddenly _wasn't _because of—of this, of _me_, I would… I would hate it. I would hate myself a little bit too, I think."

"Haruka—"

"Two answers," Haruka reminded Michiru. She shook her head, slow. "I'm selfish," she murmured.

"Selfish?" Incredulous, Michiru gave up lying down and rocked aright. She reached for Haruka. The other girl caught her hands, kept them. She gave them a fierce squeeze—more than Michiru was expecting, maybe. She straightened, intent.

"Selfish," Haruka affirmed. "Because as much as it might hurt me, hurt _you_ for them to disagree with us—no." She squeezed Michiru's hands again, ran her questing touch over smaller soldier's slender knuckles and slight nails. "No," she tried, and once more, "no."

"No?"

"No. It wouldn't stop me. _No_." Haruka wound their fingers together. She finished, "Why would it? You're what I want."

Michiru flushed. Smiled. She studied the seam of their hands, the sear of the storm in her friend's gaze. She murmured, "And you're wondering still what I want. If it's the same for me. Isn't that right?"

"It's right."

"I tend to be," Michiru sighed. "It's a burden sometimes, you know." She flexed her hands and broke the chain of their clasp: folded her palms over Haruka's cheeks again seconds later. She instructed her friend to, "Scry me. One more time." Finally, "Go as deep as you can."

Haruka made to lean back. "Michiru, I don't think—"

"That's right," Michiru said viciously. Her nails made dimples in the dents behind Haruka's jawbone. "You _don't _think. You can sit here in the dark like a martyred soldier and tell me how _you _feel, and it makes you bleed because it's hard for you and I am so, so glad you did say it, Haruka—I _am_. Don't think I'm trying to cheapen what's just happened. But because you _don't think_, you _idiot_, you don't realize who kissed who first, and who came to whose bedroom one stormy night to deliver a _second _kiss because three days of waiting for her prince to cough it up was _enough_ and just _look_, please, and _stop thinking_."

"Your nails are _really _sharp," Haruka observed, eyes enormous.

"Haruka," Michiru warned. Her hands nevertheless loosened a little, and she gave her friend an insistent shake. "_Look_."

Haruka obeyed. She looked. Saw. Remembered:

_Thirteen years old. Springtime—at the Miranda citadel and in pink-bristle blossoms along Triton's stone walls too, together. Haruka leaves the first to visit the latter on a light-shuttle two months ahead of the standard summer schedule. Her father has business on Saturn. He offers, in a rare moment of kindness to his only child, to deliver Haruka to Neptune on the way there, and to retrieve her on the journey home. When he tells her of this option, Haruka accepts with all the grim stoicism she knows the warrior-king expects of her. The instant he is out of sight, however, she allows herself a shameless victory dance amidst the throne room's trailing tapestries and maroon moorings. The royal guard shift their eyes skyward and pretend not to notice. After Haruka herself slips from their presence, some of them dare to smile._

_Haruka spends the week-long trip to Neptune on the light-shuttle plotting the best way to surprise Michiru. She sketches out hundreds of plans and scraps them all in the methodical manner of a mischief mastermind. Some involve putting slimy things in the smaller girl's bed, only to have her leap aloft into Haruka's arms; others simply specify taking a seat next to the aquamarine-haired royal at breakfast and seeing how much time elapses before she notices Haruka stealing bits of her meal. None of these are good enough, the blonde princess determines: too dependent upon arrival time or other factors beyond her control. Therefore, she will do what she is best at anyway._

_She will wing it._

_She rocks to and fro on eager feet as, at long last, the light-shuttle blares down through Triton's atmosphere. The cockpit fills with the scent of ozone. Blaze-orange rings ripple across the exterior of their craft. She looks over her father's shoulder—he is driving, of course—and gets her first glimpse of the floating continent upon which her best friend resides. The great dome over it glitters like an overturned diamond in the cloak of purple eventide, and Haruka blinks in surprise as her father grunts, "Well, land us."_

"_Sir?" she ventures. He is standing up, sweeping aside—his icicle-blue eyes on the edge of her send pleasure-prickles through her innermost heart. She stiffens instinctively. Her posture is perfect. He notices it. He grins—almost. His teeth feral-flicker-flash in the glow of the skyburn._

"_Don't dawdle, pup," he snarls goodnaturedly. He claps a hand over her shoulder, hauls her around the seat, and thrusts her into it. "We'll crash, won't we?" _

"_Sir," she acknowledges. She curls sure hands over the steering mechanism. She clicks it forward in a swoop and the craft surges into freefall. The king snarls again, this time in shock: their stomachs flutter up around their tonsils and they wallow into a slow spin. The engines whicker, plaintive at first and then because they are sucking air. Haruka's father can only stare as his daughter reaches out and turns off the fuel pump with the flat of her palm. The craft's mechanical whine dies. Calibration dials rotate to green. They level out effortlessly, pulled to precision by a single twitch of the young driver's thumb. _

_Haruka uses gravity and momentum to bring them to a feather-soft touchdown at the citadel dock. The attendant on the intercom instructs, "Stall your engines!"_

_The king takes up the mic and replies, curt, "They've been off since a mile up." He cuts the connection in the middle of the attendant's awe-startled squawk and strikes Haruka with the mic, an almost-gentle chuff on the jaw that will provide the princess an inkblot-bruise later. "Showoff," he accuses her. He smiles. It's real this time, all sharp teeth and scissor-snick sincerity._

_It cuts her to pieces inside, but Haruka clutches it anyway, treasures it. She smiles back, knowing better than to disagree. It makes the king bark out dry laughter, and he jerks her up into a quick one-armed clutch—the sun-scrub of his clipped beard rasps over Haruka's brow—before he sends her staggering toward the hatch. _

"_Go on," he growls behind her. "Go see her. I'll be back in a week." He considers. He leers—she can hear it in his voice. "Maybe more if Saturn's queen finally accepts my dinner invitation."_

"_Fat chance," Haruka volleys back. Her father provides her a rude hand gesture in response. _

_She picks up her knapsack—she will ferret clothing from Michiru if she hasn't brought enough—and trots down the steps to the docks. The attendant beckons her behind the safety line. From there she watches her father reengage the engines and drift back up past the ignition point. The nose of the craft sags—Haruka imagines him cursing a blue streak—because he has forgotten to flip the fuel pump switch she turned off not minutes prior._

_Soon the ship levels out and spins in its circuit toward the star-opening of the dome. The pulse of the light-drive rumbles down the docks like a universal heartbeat, and on a whim Haruka lifts an arm over her head and waves it frantically. She squints. She can see the ant-small figure of her father in the slice of shieldglass above the cockpit, and she drops her hand to her mouth, rubs her fingers over her lips, and flings them toward him._

_A goodbye kiss._

_He doesn't return it properly. The light-drive roars to life and the craft blips heavenward. Just before it breaks the atmosphere again, though, the tips of its wings waggle in a farewell salute. The dock attendant, privy to the proceedings, makes a hooting noise at Haruka and wiggles his eyebrows. She hits him with her knapsack as she departs his company. His bruise the next day will be bigger than hers._

_Her knapsack bouncing on her shoulder, Haruka walks through the citadel's blooming arboretum. Yellow-grasping forsythia drift about her shoulders and caress her chin; the scent of yarrow encompasses everything, and in the shade of the bower-arc trees the season's first dianthus are turning their slumbering heads clockwise. It is near nine in the evening. The moonlight rinses everything in blue-tinged pastels and silver-shimmer shine. Haruka inhales, licks her lips. She feels like she is home._

_She leaves the arboretum and climbs the stone staircase into the citadel. The guards there survey her in abject surprise, but one of them knows what she wants before she is even able to ask after it. "Her Majesty is in the music hall," he tells her. He rattles his javelin and tips her a grin. "She's had a right rotten day, too. She'll be happy to see you."_

"_Why rotten?" Haruka asks. She flips him a coin for his troubles. He catches it midair, bites it, whistles._

"_Fancy stuff!" he thanks her. He makes it disappear into his armor and his companion gives him an envious look. "She had an audience today with the heads of two warring tribes down in the south hemisphere. I happened to be there in the throne room when they was, see. I'm no politician, but I thought she had some pretty good advice for them."_

"_Good advice," echoes the other guard._

"_Right. But they didn't want to take it, on account of Her Majesty being young still. They got so riled that they threatened her."_

"_Threatened," the other guard opines sadly, sagely. He shakes his head. The moonlight makes spectral pictures across the cut of his nosepiece. _

"_She soaked 'em solid and knocked their heads together and sent them home, but not before one of them got in something about how she'll never be the diplomat her mother was. It upset Her Majesty pretty heavy, I think. Not that she let us see it," finishes Haruka's informant. "Just my opinion."_

"_And mine," says his companion. Haruka tosses him a coin too, smiling. "Thank 'ee, princess," he murmurs. He studies it shamelessly, turning it over in thick fingers. "Me daughter's a big fan of yourn. I'll givvit to her. She'll be dead keen on somefin from Miranda, I promise 'ee." _

"_Tell her it comes from the desert that looks like a dog's ear on the maps. Tell her to hold it to candlelight," Haruka counsels. "It will shine like nothing else."_

_The guards beam at her and thank her again, one time apiece. She bows her own gratitude and leaves them looking after her in her march across the courtyard. She lets herself into the citadel by way of its main entrance, nodding to the royal company and even the king as he meanders past her, a stack of scrolls in one arm and a harassed-looking tomcat clutched in the other. He smells strongly of something far worse than vinegar. "Don't ask," he recommends, and then, "my daughter is having a—"_

"_Terrible day," Haruka understands. "Music hall. On my way." She makes an A-OK circle with her thumb and forefinger._

"_Excellent," the king exults. He considers—thrusts the tomcat at her. "Toss this—this _creature _into a rain barrel on your way out, then. Perhaps it will teach him something about the consequences of making a vile wreckage of my library." He grimaces, shifting his scrolls. They are stained all shades of ochre, and that has smeared onto his ceremonial vestments as well. "And," mutters the monarch, "my robes." _

"_Majesty," Haruka agrees. She takes the feline. She bobs her respect to the king and scurries away from him as quickly as possible—he does, after all, reek. She cuts through the judgment circle at the fore of the throne room, tomcat wiggling and grouch-growling in her elbow; she fusses with the heavy door to the gardens, jerks it open at last. Fresh air and moonlight spill over her. Though there is a rain barrel near enough to touch, Haruka lowers the marmalade mouse-killer to the cobblestone path and hisses to him, "Get on now, puss."_

"Prowr,_" says the cat. He gets, gone in an orange rustle into the hydrangeas. Haruka takes a moment to brush herself free of his fur, and she also peels away her jacket. She stuffs _that _into the rain barrel. It was old anyway, and the last thing she wants is to surprise Michiru by smelling of cat piss._

_The path takes her through intersecting beds of perennials and down a gentle hilly slope. She skirts the greenhouses, almost jogging—overhead the sky shudders and undulates, and soon it will spray the citadel with a shower. The air is thick in her nostrils, telling her of the storm's eminent arrival; mist collects in her hair. Her forelocks slap against her brow. The faintest stirrings of thunder start when she comes within sight of the music hall._

_Shaped like a loaf of bread cut in twain, the hall is a place Haruka has spent countless hours being browbeaten into tickling the ivory. She knows its every chamber, its every creaking floorboard and wobbly seat. She knows how far giggles carry within its walls, and just how loud a sneeze must be to echo throughout its entirety. She knows especially, though, what it sounds like when two princesses run down its waxed-floor middle in just their stockings, skidding and laughing and sliding into one another. She is formulating a plan when she reaches the door, catches the knocker, and eases it ajar._

_She spots Michiru instantly. Standing center stage, the smaller girl has her violin on her shoulder and her bow thrown across its strings. Eyes squeezed shut, the princess weaves in time to the music she makes, a somber slow-shiver waltz that crawls up the walls like ivy. Its thorny notes pierce Haruka's heart. It is a melody meant for misery, and it must work, because while Michiru isn't quite crying, she's close enough to count. She has her teeth stapled so hard over her lower lip that she will draw blood with one more menacing arpeggio. _

_Haruka steps out of her shoes. She leaves them by the door. Her knapsack joins them. Sliding to the shadows at the side of the hall, she creeps down the end aisle. She stops when it looks like Michiru might open her eyes, moving when her friend is too lost in the wretched rhapsody to notice. She reaches the stage unseen. She clears its steps in an artful leap and drops behind the piano, but still Michiru remains ignorant of her presence._

_That suits Haruka fine. Bracing her hands on the piano bench, she vaults herself onto the seat. She lifts the shelf away from the instrument's keys, blows the dust on them into a cloud—she mimes cracking her knuckles. Lifting her eyes to Michiru and lending her ears to the other girl's song, she curves her fingers over the teeth of the piano. She waits._

_It doesn't take long for Haruka to find what she wants in the music. As Michiru takes the notes low, Haruka strikes the piano's leftmost keys. The instrument pipes out a sunny titter._

Ree! _Michiru's strings squeak and her own notes rachet inadvertently up to join Haruka's, and she spins on her heel to stare at the other princess. Her face brightens immediately—really, it's like seeing a shadow whitewashed—and she sucks in a breath to speak, but Haruka has something else in mind. So she plays another trio of notes—a gentle _la-la-la_—and Michiru, unable to back down from a challenge, softens them in the shiver of her bow across her violin's stem. She narrows her eyes. She smirks. Haruka grins back._

_They toss bridges to one another; they bounce meters. They crush Michiru's melancholy waltz beneath the heels of a ribald rhythm staggered up into allegro. Haruka's fingers give Michiru's music the wings it needs to soar, and soon she is just playing the accompaniment and Michiru, oh, Michiru is writing words of joy around and around the blonde princess, the violin like the ocean and the piano a raft bobbing cheerfully in its waves. This is the kind of race Michiru will always win no matter how hard Haruka tries in it—but that's all right. No matter the track, they are running to one another anyway._

_The music ends with Michiru breathless and cramps cricking through Haruka's fingers. They stop at the same time, an instinctive parting—Michiru's arms fall to her sides and sag there, and Haruka shakes her hands. She drops the shelf back into place over the keys. Michiru returns her own instrument lovingly to its case. As she snaps the clasps across the buckles, Haruka slides down the bench, rises, and hops from the stage._

_Michiru ventures to the edge of it a moment later, pouting. "Get back up here," she insists. She doesn't have to say _I want to hug you _because her face says it for her, and she has her arms thrust out besides. She wiggles her fingertips, expectant._

"_Nuh-uh," Haruka denies. She opens her own arms instead and lifts them, her palms out, her fingers flared. "I came nearly all the way to you," she says, matter-of-fact. "Come the last little bit to me, my princess, and I'll show you why you always should."_

"Haruka_!" Michiru giggles. She pretends to swoon, throwing her wrist up over her forehead. She peeks around her lifeline at her friend. "You're absolutely _terrible_!"_

"_Terribly charming," Haruka corrects. It's her turn to wiggle her fingers, and she does. "C'mon then. Are you gonna keep your prince waiting?" She frowns. She makes to lower her proffered limbs and warns, "Her arms might get tired…"_

_Michiru responds to this threat by launching herself gently off the stage. Haruka finds her hips midair, palms them, and Michiru's legs go about her waist and they slide backward together. Yelping out her giggles now, Michiru scolds, "Don't you dare fall or drop me, Haruka!"_

_Haruka doesn't, of course. She's too strong for that, too sure, and she tucks her face into Michiru's collarbones and muffles her smile there. She squeezes Michiru's hips. "Miss me?" she asks. _

"_That tickles," Michiru accuses. She clamps her elbows about Haruka's head and drops her cheek into strawbale locks. She scrubs it over them and Haruka hears her inhale, a shivery near-sobbing sound, before she commands, "Put me down."_

_Haruka does. Once on her own two feet, Michiru releases her only so she may lock her arms around the other royal's ribcage instead. Haruka wheezes and Michiru tells her, fierce, "Of _course_ I missed you. What are you even _doing _here?"_

"_Hm, well." Leaning back a little in the bower of her friend's embrace, Haruka reaches around to pry at Michiru's hands where they rest, clenched, in the small of her back. She works one free, and she sews their fingers together. She swings their arms out toward the wall of windows along one side of the music hall—they pose in the moonlight, a pair of princesses _en pointe_. "I thought I'd start by asking you for a dance," Haruka rejoins. "I'm allowed to travel millions of miles to do that, right?"_

_Michiru laughs, delighted—incredulous! "You really are terrible. And you _hate _dancing," she reminds Haruka._

"_Not this kind," Haruka disagrees. She looks down between them. Michiru is missing her shoes, but she is not barefoot. Her stockings make her legs gleam like marble. _

_Perfect._

"_What kind?" Michiru asks, and Haruka answers by sweeping the two of them along the music hall's silk-smooth floorboards. She leads. Her friend follows, her laughter ringing to the rafters. They bob—they dip, dart, dance indeed. They spin, holding fast to one another so neither will fall. They shriek. _

_They sock-skate. _

_And when their ankles are screaming and their socks are wrinkled beyond repair and the storm has broken over the music hall in a symphony of snitter-spring showers, they skid to a stop and Michiru, laughing, lifts her face to Haruka's. She presses her lips chastely to the taller girl's chin and says, "Thank you, my prince." Her eyes are full of sea-secrets and moonlight and something else, something that has been there since they first surveyed one another over frogs so many years ago, something that kindles higher-brighter-stronger every summer, and Haruka—_

—realized, abruptly. The memory broke around her and she flailed, and Michiru caught her arms and held them and said, her eyes so wide so deep so drowning-dark, "Haruka! Haruka, let go! Let go so you can breathe!"

Haruka tore her gaze from Michiru's. She breathed. She choked on it, clapped her hands over her nose as it blazed bright-hot. She shivered such that the bed rocked, and Michiru, contrite, curled her arms around the taller girl. "Sssh," she offered. "Sssh, it's fine. It's fine. You're here. You're back—I've got you. I've got you, Haruka."

"Is that what it's like in the mirror?" Haruka demanded. Her stomach flipflopped; her ribs groaned and she hunched anyway, awash in a cold, cruel sweat. "Is that what it's like when you look in there?"

Michiru hesitated, reluctant. Haruka furled a fist in her nightgown, tugged it, hissed, "Michiru. Michiru, please. I have to know."

The smaller princess rested her fingertips in the dips of Haruka's knuckles. Resigned, she answered, "Oh, Haruka—it's fathoms deeper."

"How do you come back?" husked the other girl, hoarse. Horrified: "How _can _you?"

Michiru smiled. She drew Haruka's trembling hand to her mouth and kissed the crease of its thumb. "You're here," she said. "That's enough."

The storm spat. Lightning strobed. The princesses looked up as one, saw each other in the silver spurs slapped along the night's slender ankles.

"Did you—" Michiru began.

"Yes," Haruka said softly. She considered. She went on, awed, "All—all this time? You… you wanted…" She couldn't finish it.

Michiru helped her. "You," she supplied. She squirmed up along the mattress and slid beneath Haruka's arm, at once shameless and shy. She worried her fingers over Haruka's and said, "You. Yes. I wanted _you_, you idiot. I always have. I always do. Even when you poured ink in my tea—even when you lace up my dress wrong and the front falls open during ceremonies. I want to feel you standing behind me and I want to walk in your shadow because it's cooler there, and I want your elbow to touch mine at breakfast and I want to hold your stupid hand, and I want to play with your hair, and I want to see you smile and sometimes I want to taste it too, and—and… I can't _believe you asked me what I want_, Haruka! You caught a _frog _for me and you're always there and you're just—you're so _wonderful_, and how could I _not_ want you? Huh? Can you tell me that? Can you?"

Michiru paused. She huffed. She looked up at Haruka, half-laughing, half-crying. She was beautiful. "Eloquence," she apologized, jerking a thumb at herself. "I'm the epitome of it."

"You're kind of loud," Haruka granted.

Michiru bristled. "Why you enormous _jer_—_mn_!"

Haruka kissed the complaint away. She caught Michiru's fist as it crafted a trajectory toward her face. She held it until its fingers fell limp and loose. She tightened her arm around her friend, lifted her near, and Michiru braced a knee in her belly and it burned, but Haruka refused to care and Michiru refused to notice.

They breathed sometimes—others they didn't. Neither of them were very good at what they were doing and Michiru giggled now and then, and Haruka laughed, and when they were tired they slumped into one another and Haruka said, "Michiru?"

"Mm?" the smaller princess sleepily inquired.

"I'm sorry I bit you."

"Uh? Oh." Michiru plucked at the collar of her nightshirt, yawned. "That's—that's fine. I sort of liked it. But you, mm… _you_ can explain the teethmarks to my father if he notices them."

"Fair enough," Haruka consented. The rain lulled. Michiru drowsed. Haruka followed suit. At the fringe of oblivion, though, she blinked partway to waking. She shook her friend and asked again, "Michiru?"

"_What_, Haruka? I'm trying to sleep here and your shoulder is really, really bony so it's taking most of my concentration—"

"You can have me. If... if that's what you want," Haruka murmured. "But only if I can, uhm. Have you too."

Michiru thought about it—or pretended to think about it. "Fair enough," she echoed. And then, as she burrowed her cheek into Haruka's throat, "Okay."

Haruka nodded. She smiled—she felt Michiru do the same against her pulsepoint. "Okay," she whispered to the darkness, exultant.

She closed her eyes.

They slept.


	4. Chapter Four:  High Tide

**Warning: **This story implies the eventual involvement of two women together. Don't like? Don't read.

**Commentary: **I am so sorry this took so long! Between this chapter and the last, I traveled across the country, moved dwellings, engaged in a fruitless search for a couch—err. Anyway! Hopefully such a gap between updates won't happen again. My apologies.

I owe many thanks to my friends for sticking by me as I wrote this—for telling me to get on with it. For showing continued interest. For just being there. Thank you so much, all of you. You know who you are!

In lieu of some comments on other stuff I've written, I've made some changes to the previous chapter and attempted not to fall into a weird-wording habit with this one. I hope I've succeeded. Please let me know. =)

**Rating change ahoy**! Haruka and Michiru are growing up. So too does the rating mature a little, and it will continue to do so as the chapters progress.

A few people have asked me if this story will stay cute and sweet. I appreciate such questions—and I'll answer you with this one. How did the Silver Millennium end?

This is the story of Haruka, Michiru, and their relationship as it evolved during that Silver Millennium. I intended them to be sixteen years old here. Whether or not that works is up to you, readers.

I originally didn't intend this story to be even this long, so its eventual breadth is unknown. If you like it enough to see it persist, the best way to have that happen is to **let me know**!

To all of you who read, review, message, question, critique, and encourage me: thank you so much. Please continue to do so.

As always, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

**Disclaimer: **I do not own the BSSM franchise. It belongs to the goddess Takeuchi Naoko.

* * *

_Allow me to exaggerate a memory or two  
Where summers lasted longer than, longer than we do  
Where nothing really mattered except for me to be with you  
But in time we all forgot  
And we all grew_

—Panic At the Disco, "Folkin' Around"

**CHAPTER FOUR: High Tide**

"Michiru, for the love of God. _Help me_."

"Stop whining, you." Michiru looked up in the mirror at the reflection of her anguished best friend. A smirk ran away with her smile. "I've been helping you the entire afternoon. See all the good it's done?"

"I mean—get me _out _of this. Tell them I'm sick. Revoltingly sick. Spewing from all orifices sick."

"Spewing?" Michiru found a hairpin, rolled it in her fingers, and stuck it between her lips. She wrinkled her nose. "Haruka, that's…"

"Disgusting? Uh-huh," exulted the blonde. "They'll definitely think so too. They'll tell me to stay locked in my room, as far away from other individuals as humanly possible." Haruka straightened. She grinned, all the hope of a new star burning over her sun-bronzed face. "Yeah! It's got to work! It's fullproof!"

"_Fool_proof, you mean, and no it isn't, because I'm not fool enough to do it for you." Michiru, maneuvering the hairpin to the corner of her mouth, graced Haruka with the sight of her tongue. "Nyeh!" she surmised. She tacked on, "You're doomed. Face it."

"Miiiiii-chiiii-ruuuuuu," Haruka begged. "_Please_. I'll—I'll sit next to that diplomat who always tries to lean his fake teeth against your plate. I'll eat those green things you hate—you know. The ones that smell like boathouse refuse. I'll… come _on_. I'll do _whatever you want _but you _have _to help me!"

Turning on the padded seat at the fore of her vanity, Michiru delicately spat the hairpin into her hand. She wove it behind an ear, patted the newly restricted curls, and frowned. She looked over her shoulder to study herself in the mirror. "Hum," she said. It was a sound of neither approval nor rejection. She wondered, "Don't you _already _do whatever I want?"

"I—"

"That's right!" Michiru looked forward again. She clapped her hands, beaming. "You _do_!" Her smirk smoothed over, stonelike and stern. "Consider all pleas pointless from here on, Haruka. You are going to the gala and you are going in _that _dress"—Haruka put in a studious groan—"and yes, you _will _probably trip in it, but everyone's going to be so stunned by the sight of your breasts that they won't notice if you fall into a flamepit, I _promise_. So hush. Man up, if you will." She feathered her fingers over the vanity behind her, seeking another pin. She finished, "Are you ready for me to fix your hair yet?"

"You," Haruka informed her lover, defeated, "are the lowest of the low. The cruelest of the cruel. The most piteous of the pitiless—"

"_Hair_," Michiru insisted. She rose and swept her elbow toward the bench. "Get over here, brat." She paused, considered. She admitted after an evaluative study, "That last one was pretty good."

Haruka clicked resignedly over to the bench. She heaved herself over the padding and presented her nest of cowlicks to Michiru, wiggling her eyebrows beneath her forelocks. "If I come up with a few more like it, will you _consider _helping me?"

Michiru curled her fingers in the sandy spires. Hauling Haruka's head gently backward, she breathed against the startled pucker of the other royal's lips, "Not a _chance_," and kissed her, a slow, sweet embrace that sent all tension from Haruka's spine in a delighted shiver. She broke away moments later with a satisfied smack, leaving Haruka mouthing air. "Besides," she said practically, "while I'm not exactly _startled _by the sight of your breasts, I'll take any opportunity I can to view them in public without causing a scene, and that low-cut dress is just _perfe—_"

"Did I mention you were cruel?" Haruka interrupted, sulking. "Miserly? Wicked?"

Michiru palmed her lover's cheek. She caressed it, nodding, and surveyed the picture they made together in the mirror. "It's come up a few times," she acknowledged. And then, "But Haruka, look how lovely we are."

Haruka looked, reluctant. Michiru's smirk softened to a smile again in the mirror and their reflections gazed unwaveringly back at them: Haruka's all anxiety wrapped in a scoop-neck evening-sky gown, Michiru's pure resplendence amidst its own kelp-crinkled clasp. Two sets of eyes in the looking glass, one pair creased at the corners, the other widened, gentled by fondness. Two faces, a narrow oval and a rounded heart.

Two halves of a whole.

Haruka flushed.

A frilly, _fancy _whole.

Michiru chased her lover's blush with her fingertips and giggled. "You look rakish," she attempted. "Regal. Rogue. And—"

"And ridiculous."

"Ye—no! _No_." Michiru rolled her eyes. "You don't look _ridiculous_, Haruka. Do you honestly think I'd let you leave this room if you did?"

Haruka thought about it. She decided, "Absolutely."

"Then you don't know me well at all, do you?"

"Better than anyone else," grouched the taller princess. She turned her face into Michiru's palm to hide it, nibbled at her lover's lifeline. "No," she acknowledged a moment later. "No, I don't really think you'd let me leave if I looked stupid."

"Ridiculous," Michiru reminded her. "You said ridiculous."

"Same thing."

"Maybe, but it's important to be consistent," Michiru teased.

"Fine, _fine_. Ridiculous. I don't think you'd let me leave if I looked _ridiculous_." Haruka's pale-flax lashes brushed Michiru's index finger and she looked up again, mostly to reevaluate their vista in the mirror. She shook her head. "I _feel _ridiculous," she muttered.

Michiru's palm left Haruka's cheek. The smaller soldier set to work on her friend's hair, her tools her fingernails and a comb. "Rest assured you shouldn't," she replied. She found a scar at the base of the visiting royal's skull, frowned, smoothed it with her thumb. Haruka nudged into her ministrations gratefully. "Anything I can do to… assuage your worries, maybe?" Michiru offered. She continued, "Where did this come from?"

"Mmn," Haruka approved. "Puh-practice. Little to th—_uh_!_ Yeeeeah_. That's—that's great."

"What made it?" Michiru pressed harder along the seam of the scar. She kneaded. She flicked the comb expertly across the swoops and sprigs of her friend's locks, unable to help toying with them. Haruka hissed and she paused, biting her lip. "Does it hurt?"

"Uh? Oh—yeah. Yeah, it hurts. Stings a mite. D… deep in." She shivered, shimmied backward on the bench a bit. "But mostly it's good," she encouraged Michiru hopefully. "Don't stop."

"Haruka!" Michiru made to withdraw her touch. "I'm not going to keep it up if it stings!"

Haruka looked over her shoulder at her partner, brows bent. She grinned. "That's a little hypocritical of you, don't you think?"

"What?"

"_You _like it when it stings. It always makes you—"

"_That_," Michiru cut in, pink-cheeked, "is different."

"It certainly isn't. Now Michiru," Haruka objected, sighing, "remember. It's important to be consistent."

Temporarily bested, Michiru dropped a kiss of reward on the shell of Haruka's ear and smiled into the soft skin behind it. "Hm. What made it?" she asked again.

"A rock, I think," Haruka mused. She watched Michiru work in the mirror, not so much interested as she was resigned. "It might have been a metal fragment. I don't know exactly."

"How do you not know _exactly _what took a chunk out of your head?"

"Be fair. It was more like a slice." Michiru tugged a hank of hair nearby her friend's temple, sharp. Wincing, Haruka amended, "It's hard to know what all's flying around in the middle of a dustdevil."

Obliged, Michiru went back to worrying the faint part along Haruka's upper jawline. As much as she attempted to hide her respect in favor of taking a stern approach, admiration colored her next question. "Middle, huh? And how big was this dustdevil?"

"Oh, _well_," Haruka hemmed. She lifted a hand and studied the nails thereon, pride etched over her features. "Pretty big, I guess."

"Mm?" Michiru nudged. "Hand me a hairpin."

Haruka did. "Maybe as big as the citadel," she admitted. She stopped, struggled with stoicism—lost. She said excitedly, "You should have seen it! I could feel it starting somewhere down under my ribs—it _itched_, Michiru, itched like hellfire! I ripped up the whole training court before I realized how big it was going to be, and after I got it under control a little I had to go _leagues _out into the desert to keep it from eating _everything_—"

She cut herself off, eyes gleaming, teeth a sharp white line under lips peeled back in a grin of eager remembrance. Michiru, giggling at the feral expression, insisted, "And what _then_, eh?" She realized something, clapped a hand over her mouth. "Oh! How mad was your father about the training court? I can't even begin to imagine his face…"

"_Hah_," Haruka half-cackled, "he was _pissed_! He made me resurface the entire thing in doublestack brick." She huffed, slapped her knees, and persisted, "But it was _worth it_, Michiru, God! All the winds from across the continent came to me and—and they _circled_ and talked to me and when I talked back, they _listened_, and I could touch and turn them with my fingers and it was—it was just…"

"Wonderful?" Michiru offered. She slid the hairpin home on Haruka's crown.

"…yeah." Haruka's face went quiet, content. She leaned back into Michiru and the other princess held her, relishing in the sensation of a memory made momentous between them. "Yeah," she agreed again, "it was wonderful." She chewed her lower lip and eyed Michiru thoughtfully. She provided at length, "There was one pitfall, though. Aside from you not being there with me, I mean."

Michiru mimed fanning herself. "Flatterer. The green bottle, please. No—that's not green, Haruka, that's mint. The other one. Yes, thank you." The princess snapped the top of said bottle open and squeezed free a coin-sized smear of cream. She lathered it between her hands, asking as she plunged them seconds later into Haruka's obstinate cowlicks, "What was the pitfall?"

"Clothing."

Michiru blinked. Paused. Ventured, "Sorry?"

"Clothing," Haruka repeated. "I didn't think to take along an extra set of it."

"Why would you need to—"

"The winds tore off every stitch I was wearing."

The smaller woman's mouth fell slack. Soon, though, her lips twitched and her chest hitched and Michiru _laughed_, a dulcet song she sought to muffle in Haruka's shoulder. "_No_," she insisted.

Haruka lamented in turn, "Oh yes. And whatever hit me knocked me cold, so I was stretched out bare-assed in the desert in the middle of the _day_—"

"Bare-assed," Michiru echoed weakly, and dissolved into powerless giggles. She hammered a fist against Haruka's hip.

Affixing her friend with a jaundiced eye, Haruka demanded as those giggles faded a smidge, "Are you finished savoring my misfortune?"

"No, but I'll save the rest for later," Michiru managed. She wiped her eyes with the heel of a hand and attempted, blinking rapidly, to return her attention to Haruka's hair. "Do go on. _Please_."

"Where was I?"

"Bare-assed," Michiru reminded the other soldier. She stapled her teeth over the inside of her cheek to keep from breaking into bits once more.

"Right," Haruka pressed. "So. Because of being _bare-assed_"—she allowed Michiru a few generous giggles—"and unconscious, such as I was, in the middle of the day, such as _it _was, I got a terrible sunburn where _no one _should _ever _get a sunburn. I mean, it was criminal. I couldn't sit down for a week afterward."

This was almost too much for Michiru. Trembling, she hooked her hands over Haruka's shoulders and held on for sheer sanity, letting loose her laughter again down the line of her lover's spine. "Oh," she gasped, "oh _please_—how… how did you get _home_?"

Haruka stiffened proudly. Her newly-ample chest swelled. "I walked, of course," she said. "As much as it hurt. And as embarrassing," and she grimaced, dropping her eyes to her gown-clad knees, "as it was to ask for entry permission at the gate in front of the entire evening regiment."

"_No_," Michiru hissed a second time, delighted.

"Uh-huh," the taller soldier confessed. "Hundreds of soldiers privy to my… my…"

"Bare ass," Michiru finished, delicate.

They looked at each other in the mirror.

Two halves of a whole.

They knocked brows and laughed together helplessly.

"You know," Haruka put in a few moments later, "I'm surprised you didn't notice the scar sooner."

"I'm not." Michiru went back to threatening her partner's hair into some semblance of scattered order. She shook her head. "You've only been here a few days and we've been the both of us wrapped up in everything but each other. I haven't had time to enact a proper inspection of you." She feathered her fingers down the nape of Haruka's neck, apologetic. "I'm sorry," she voiced. "I am." Letting her hand wander aloft again, she tweaked the scar and asked, "Forgive me?"

Haruka licked her lips, closed her eyes partway. "I don't know," she hedged. "That depends—when do you intend to, ah, enact a proper inspection of me? That's what you said, right?"

"Right," confirmed the teal-tressed princess.

Haruka nodded, lifted a finger. "Don't forget," she said, "I still need to get my hands on you too." She shot her lover a sinister half-smile, all moony mischief. "Though I intend to conduct more than a… proper inspection, shall we say."

"Is that so?" Michiru laughed.

Haruka solemnly agreed, "It's so. Factor that in, now."

"Mmm-hm. Haruka, you have this one cowlick, I swear—one day I'm just going to glue it down!" The smaller princess fiddled with the stubborn spike of hair a moment, sighed expansively, and shifted her attention elsewhere. She resumed, "How long will your more-than-proper inspection take, I wonder?"

Flicking her eyes up to Michiru's in the mirror, Haruka rocked her chin in her palm and mused, "I don't know. What will you let me do?" She relayed, "Certain things take more time than others. Or so I've heard."

Michiru laughed again—but more softly this time, sinister-shy and seeking. "What do you _want _me to let you do, Haruka?"

"Do I really have to say it?"

"How else would you let me know? Don't tell me you're thinking of passing notes. If one of those was intercepted—"

"I _intended_," Haruka put in, lofty, "to _show _you. If I told you my plans beforehand, it would spoil the surprise."

"It's a surprise now, is it?" Michiru found a tangle. She tugged it free.

"It's _several _surprises," the taller royal promised. "And you love surprises. Right?"

"I do," Michiru acknowledged. She set the comb aside and wiped her hands on a towel draped over the edge of the vanity. "Finished," she proclaimed.

They scrutinized their reflections a final time in the mirror. Haruka praised Michiru's efforts by taking the other woman's hand and brushing her lips over the pale knuckles. Cupping Michiru's fingers to her mouth to ensure her words fell only into the smaller soldier's clasp, she admitted, "You look beautiful."

Michiru lowered her eyes, fluttered the lashes demurely, and replied, "I know." The curtained flush in her cheeks belied her true gratitude, and she softened the tease with, "Thank you, Haruka." She fell quiet. She considered. Her gaze sliding slowly between their reflections and her partner proper, she observed, "There's still something missing, I think."

She drew Haruka back against her, such that the taller woman's head came to nestle in the low valley of her cleavage. She rocked on the balls of her feet. Haruka's makeshift pillow bounced a bit.

Michiru wondered, "How's that?"

"That," Haruka allowed hoarsely, "is _perfect_."

"And _adorable,_" gushed a new voice.

Haruka's head whipped sideways so quickly that her neck cracked. Grinning unrepentantly from the doorway, a teenager possessed of brilliant blue eyes and sun-blonde hair wiggled her fingertips. She tipped the couple a wink. "Looks comfy!" she sighed. She flounced into the room uninvited, body ablaze in its crimson gown. "Mind if I give it a go?"

Haruka closed her eyes, groaned. Red railroaded into her face. "_Minako_," she seethed.

"Hey," protested the Venusian royal, "don't act like I interrupted something—"

"You _did _interrupt something."

"You," snipped Minako, taking a seat shamelessly on the bench next to Haruka, "left the _door_ open." Dropping her head onto Michiru's breast too, she looked up at the hosting princess and smiled winningly. "Isn't that right, Michiru?" She tacked on, "This really _is _comfortable."

"It's right, and I'm glad you think so," said Michiru graciously. She gave the visitor's shoulder an affectionate squeeze. "Hello, Minako."

"Hi!" Minako flashed both women a bright grin. "Aren't you just _delighted _to see me? I was almost late! Disturbances in the asteroid belt, you know—fringe groups. Delayed my shuttle _two whole days_. I can't _imagine _having had to miss the party and"—she pressed her face to the collar of Michiru's dress—"_these _particular festivities—"

"They're _my _festivities," Haruka put in.

"Don't sulk," advised Minako. "It's bad for the complexion."

"You know what else is bad for the complexion?" Haruka posed. "Lounging around on Michiru's boobs. If you're not me."

Minako arched a challenging brow. She nuzzled her cheek pointedly into Michiru's softer bits. Impressed by her brass, the teal-haired princess laughed—Minako's temple knocked Haruka's. "Do you have any scientific evidence to prove that?" demanded the Venusian.

Haruka cracked her knuckles.

Popping upright like a cork from a wine bottle, Minako primly neatened her gown. "Scientific enough for me," she assured Haruka. She wrinkled her nose at the taller blonde. "You _did _leave the door open, though. Honestly."

"That doesn't mean it was an invitation to interrupt us," grouched Haruka. Reaching discreetly down between them, Michiru gave her lover a pinch and a warning look. Haruka scowled—but rolled her eyes to their visitor, sighed, and parlayed, "Your complexion is safe. _Hello_, Minako."

The younger girl bobbed to her feet. Kissing Haruka's cheek, then Michiru's, she chuckled, "Hi, hi, you two." She smelled like sharp sugar. Haruka couldn't decide whether she liked it. "Sorry for sticking my nose in—it's in my genes. You know how it is."

"Must be a terrible affliction. Worse than pox, sounds like," muttered Haruka.

Minako opened her mouth to respond to the jibe, but Michiru cut in gently, "You mentioned fringe groups?"

Minako's jovial face hardened slightly. "I did," she acknowledged. "Nearby Jupiter. We caught their transmissions by pure luck—their broadcasts on non-sanctioned channels set our suspicions high at the outset." The soldier made a cutting motion with a white-gloved hand. "I initiated a routine stop-in. Nothing major, right? Well, that small investigation migrated into a full-fledged firefight on Ceres."

Casting a careful glance to Michiru's door, which was still ajar, Minako dropped her voice and admitted, "We sustained heavy hits from undocumented ammunition before we got the shields up. We weren't expecting resistance to the stop-in, much less retaliation." Noting Haruka's frown, she defended, "A poor excuse for the shields being down, _fine_, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it." She huffed a little. She muttered, tone near a whisper now, "The attack maneuver wasn't the biggest surprise. After we managed to suppress and cloister the heart of the fringe group, we sacked out their headquarters and found stockpiles of foreign weaponry." She hesitated—said finally, "We're talking big stockpiles here, guys."

"Foreign?" Haruka voiced, interest piqued. "From outside the system?"

"Was anyone hurt?" Michiru queried too.

"Well, see, loads more _might _have been hurt if not for Jupiter. The soldier, not the planet," Minako clarified. She smirked. "She heard my call for the stop-in and decided to flank me, since she was en route here too. Lucky for me she did. Her ship took the brunt of the first assault. I'm pretty sure," admitted the blonde gingerly, "if mine had been in its place, it would have blown apart. But Jovian craft, you know, they're built like tanks, and Jupiter's got enough of a temper that you can smell the barbeque she cooked up from here…"

She trailed off. The corner of her mouth twitched.

Michiru cocked her head. Her applied hairpins held in her curls admirably. "Was anyone hurt?" she repeated. The question came out gentle.

"Yeah. Yeah, Jupiter—well. _Makoto _was, before she transformed. Some shrapnel in her arm. A few of her crew sustained non-life-threatening injuries. My pilot's blitz-blind from the glare of the missile fire." Minako stopped. Gazing at her reflection and those of her friends in the mirror, she rubbed her thumb over her bare collarbones.

"The weaponry's not from outside the system," she resolved. "I had Ami look at a few of the confiscated items. She said their—uh." Minako fumbled. "Their collective elemental composite was consistent for this sector. Whatever that means."

"They're made of what weapons in the Kingdom are usually made of," Michiru translated. "So what's making you call them foreign, Minako?"

"Their strength," said Minako immediately. "Their _charge_. Whatever they're firing, it's not Lunar ammunition. It's got a bigger bang. It opened up a hole the size of my shoe closet in Makoto's ship—trust me, that's huge. And they gave off a strange energy too—the kind that runs up and down your arms and stirs all the hair on your head up straight. I could feel it even before they fired the first time."

Minako bit her lip. She finished, "It was like… like things crawling. Things crawling in the dark."

She shuddered.

Lifting her eyes to Michiru again, Haruka frowned. "Nothing in the mirror lately? An attack like that—huge piles of weapons. Sounds like more than just a fringe group."

"I've encountered a few low ripples," the princess disagreed. "Small stirrings. Nothing indicative of a firefight like this." Reaching out to brush Minako's elbow, she said, "But Ceres and the inner circuits are a little beyond my scope. I'll ask Rei about it tonight—compare notes, so to speak. If there's something brewing out there, Minako, we'll find it."

"I'd really like it if you did," Minako said fervently. "Makoto might enjoy getting the unexpected opportunity to roast a few morons toting big guns, but I like keeping my ass intact, thank you _very _much, and I _nearly _lost a cheek—"

"Please," said still another voice from the door, "no one wants to hear about your bony little ass." Nudging the barricade aside, a lanky brunette stuck her head beyond the jamb and requested, "May I come in?"

Lifting her head finally from the comfort of Michiru's bosom, Haruka affirmed, "You may. Let's see your newest red badge, hm?"

Makoto slipped sheepishly into the room—dealt with Minako's raspberry and hooked an elbow gently about Michiru to embrace her. "Hi guys," she greeted the assembled soldiers. A grin took her features and bronzed them. "It's not a badge," she told Haruka, who returned the grin. "It's just a little cut. Look, they gave me this tiny wimp of a bandage…"

She displayed her right arm for the group to examine. The limb was swathed in white wraps from wrist to elbow, its fingers puffy and swollen. Crescent-shaped bruises walked from the edge of said wraps along Makoto's upper arm and across her shoulder, disappearing beneath the gown she wore in recognition of the night's impending events. At the sight of the covered wound, Minako made a distressed, guilty sound—Michiru pursed her lips, and even Haruka's grin faded a bit.

The last ran her thumb over the seam of the wraps. "Damn," she said softly. She felt the sentiment echoed by the rest in the room. "Makoto, that… that's not exactly little."

Makoto flicked her eyes discreetly from Haruka to Minako. Her mouth tightened. "C'mon," she prodded the elder soldier. "Minor at best. I've got two arms, after all. And you should've seen the other guy. Uh." Makoto held up—with a wince and some difficulty—two of her bloated fingers. "Guys. Plural."

Realizing the brunette's aim of keeping Minako in good spirits about the incident, Haruka allowed with a roll of thunderhead eyes, "Listen to that. So _benign_. So _humble_."

"It's nothing you can't handle," Michiru reinforced. She shot Makoto a tense, concerned smile. In an attempt to diffuse the situation, she waved the two newcomers closer and allowed, "While battle scars make delightful fashion accessories, Haruka doesn't have any quite as visible as yours, Makoto. Minako, she lacks your sheer poise. And she can't even begin to compare to _me_—"

"Oi!" Haruka protested. Her lover provided her a punishing swat.

"As I was saying," Michiru went on, ignoring Minako's surprised preen, Makoto's giggle, and her partner's sulk, "Haruka is _missing _something tonight. Have a look at her in the mirror, ladies." The hosting princess stepped back from the bench a bit. She invited her guests to, "See if you have any suggestions as to how we might remedy that."

Makoto conjured immediately, "The back of her dress is unzipped."

"Oh no," replied Michiru, all innocence, "I wonder how that happened?" She leaned over to re-zip the dress. "What else?"

Haruka scowled as Minako's head loomed into view above her own in the mirror's reflection. "She's not smiling," the brighter blonde accused Haruka. "You look better when you do, you huge sourpuss." She tapped her chin, thoughtful, and agreed, "Michiru's right. Something _is _missing…"

She leaned in close—clasped Haruka's jaw gently and turned the elder soldier's head first one way, then another.

"Michiru," she asked suddenly, "do you have a jewelry box?"

"I don't wear jewelry—" Haruka began.

Michiru neatly stifled the claim with the reply of, "On the dresser. Help yourself. _Hush_, Haruka. Applying fresh eyes to a problem situation is always a good idea."

"I'm being _ambushed _by femininity," groaned Haruka. She stiffened, ignoring Minako's victorious flounce over to the indicated dresser and the prize waiting on its surface. "Hey—_problem situation_? Since when am I a problem situation?"

"It's not you exactly," Makoto attempted. She looked to Michiru for confirmation, who nodded. "Right? It's—it's more making you _look_ like an actual princess that's the problem situation."

"I _am _an actual princess," Haruka reminded the brunette, tone deadpan.

"I think we all know how well you pull off the image, though," Minako laughed. Flipping open the box, she dug her fingers greedily into Michiru's store of shiny trinkets. "Since you're always, oh, prancing around in fancy skirts and heels and all such royal accoutrements." Haruka shivered at the idea and Minako insisted, "See? _Exactly_. We need something that's going to show people how princess-like you can be—without scaring them to death or shoving it down their throats. Otherwise you'll embarrass Michiru, and we can't have that, can we?"

Haruka said nothing. Her telling silence was answer enough.

Satisfied, Minako mused as necklaces, bracelets, and other sundry ornaments clinked beneath her nails, "Something classy. Something subtle. Something you can't screw up… _aha_."

She closed her hand over an object in the jewelry box, snatched it free, and tucked it behind her back before Haruka could get a good look at it.

"What is it?" asked the wind soldier suspiciously.

"It's _perfect_, that's what it is," Minako gloated. She gave Haruka's partner a smolderingly intent glance and motioned her over. Intrigued, Michiru approached her scheming guest. Minako showed her the pilfered object, careful to keep Haruka—who was craning her neck now, eyes narrowed—from catching a glimpse of it.

"That _is _perfect," Michiru admitted. "But she doesn't have—"

"An easy fix!" Minako trumpeted. She thrust out an arm and joined elbows with her host. "Take a walk with me, eh Michiru? We'll go fetch Rei and Ami and _viola_—it's done. Know what I mean?"

The Venusian jazzercised her brows at Michiru, who hid a grin behind curved fingers. "I think I do, yes," the resident royal murmured. She rested those fingers on Minako's arm. Despite her ribald nature, even Minako went pink at the delicate brush. Fluttering cobalt-simmer lashes, Michiru wondered, "Will you lead the way, then?"

"O-_oh _yeah," Minako chirped. She made for the door and Michiru trailed behind a half-step.

"Hey!" Haruka remonstrated. "Wait just a second! Michiru—you're _abandoning _me?"

"I'm taking a quick walk," Michiru rebuffed her lover.

"And fetching Rei and Ami!" chimed in the room's other blonde.

"_Why _do we—err. Why do _you _need them too?" Haruka tried not to sound like a crotchety old woman. She suspected she wasn't very successful.

Makoto, who had been observing the exchange in quiet amusement, contributed the comment, "They'll make it a party." She shook her hips which, despite the gangly tendencies of the rest of her teenage body, did a fine job conveying all sorts of sinful, curvy promise. She also knocked a bottle off Michiru's vanity. Resilient, the container bounced over and eventually rolled across the floor. Four sets of eyes mapped its progress.

It disappeared beneath Michiru's bed.

"That," Haruka said, "does not even _remotely _comfort me."

"Then think of Rei and Ami as just two more people who are going to help hold you down," Minako encouraged Haruka pleasantly, "while we make you _pretty_." Stomping a heeled foot—the motion lent the chamber an abrupt _clack_!—the visiting soldier barked, "Makoto! Guard her! Don't let her escape!" Sapphire eyes blazing, Minako looked—if only for an instant—every inch the leading commander she was in battle-borne situations. "Read me?"

"Loud and clear, captain," agreed Makoto. She gave Haruka a toothy grin and folded her good hand over the taller girl's shoulder.

Haruka rolled her eyes. Resigned, she watched her best friend and her best nuisance parade, arm in arm, from the bedchamber and down the adjoining hall. Their bubbly, beaming laughter floated back to her, the notes burying themselves in her body like knives. Rusty, _jagged _knives.

"Traitor," she grumbled. She flicked her gaze sullenly to Makoto. The comment was somewhat directed at her guard—mostly, though, at Michiru.

"Aw, we all mean well," Makoto comforted her friend. She released her grip on Haruka's shoulder and folded her arms: carefully. As she opened and closed her swollen fingers in experimental flexes, she observed, "Besides, if you _really _didn't want any part of this, you're scary enough to have frightened us off by now. Seriously. Have you ever looked at your own face? Like, when you're mad?"

"Can't say I've had the opportunity. I'm not the one who carries around a mirror, you know." Haruka heaved a great, suffering sigh. She pursued, "Is it demonic?"

"Hm?"

"My face. When I'm angry—is it demonic?"

Makoto smirked and dropped into a defensive crouch. "First, are you gonna make a break for it? Do I really have to guard you?"

Haruka arched a brow at her childhood sparring partner.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Straightening once more, Makoto took a seat on the edge of Michiru's bed and hooked her ankles. Her ginkgo-hued wardrobe clashed horribly with the resident comforter. "Your face isn't demonic exactly, no," she began. "It's empty. Flat and dry and terrible, and you do this thing with your lips—it's a sneer, sort of, and a snarl too, and your teeth look like little white stones, and—"

Makoto broke off to allow herself a single quiver.

"It can't be _that _bad," Haruka said, and secretly hoped it was.

"Oh, trust me. It is. I get chills thinking about it. Bad chills," Makoto put in, and made a face. "Straight down the middle of my back."

She fell quiet. Her lime gaze flitted curiously from corner to corner, taking in the room's decorations and cool atmosphere—they lighted on Haruka too, flicked away again. The visiting royal swung her feet. She was wearing sandals, Haruka noted, the coliseum sort that laced up along the top of the foot.

Though wild horses could not have pulled the admission from her, Haruka instantly coveted those sandals.

"—was pretty bad," Makoto finished.

"What?" Haruka lifted her head, jerked her eyes to the other girl's face. "Sorry?"

"Were you staring at my shoes?"

"Your—_of course not_. Shoes? Fff." Haruka attempted to toss her hair. She failed miserably: mostly because she didn't have enough hair to toss, and a little too because what fledging mane she did possess was cemented to her skull courtesy of Michiru's earlier efforts. "What did you say?"

Haruka received a knowing look. "The stop-in," Makoto repeated, "really was pretty bad. It went to pure hell in a handbasket. Minako's upset I got hurt. The fact of the matter is, though, that she'd be far worse off or dead if I hadn't been there. She knows that too, and it's eating at her." Makoto scratched at the bandages on her arm. "Thanks," she told Haruka, "for helping to distract her."

"She's terrible company when she broods," Haruka dismissed. Frowning, she turned on the vanity bench—she was fairly sure she couldn't straddle it wearing a dress, much as she was tempted to try—and drummed her shorn nails on the padded seat. "She said the weapons you discovered after the conflict were foreign. You agree with that?"

"I don't know. I've never seen anything like them, and I've had training in weaponry origin since I was old enough to make a fist, but people develop new stuff all the time and don't document it within the Kingdom's records…" The girl considered. She maintained, "I _do_ think they're all kinds of trouble." Makoto mimed an explosion in the flare of tanned fingers. Her eyes flickered. "Forgive me this, but they're _creepy_, Haruka. Creepy as hell. They feel almost _alive_."

The comment surprised Haruka, and she chased it with, "How do you mean?"

"I mean this." The younger teenager presented her bandaged arm. She hesitated only the briefest moment before she pulled free the clip that held the wraps in place, unwinding them slowly in a stretchy net over her good fingers. When she had peeled free enough of the fabric for Haruka to get a proper look at the wound it was intended to protect, she leaned forward and showed her friend the damage.

Haruka's first thought was that they looked like teethmarks. _They_: dark stippled wells in Makoto's flesh, some spaced evenly, others scattered in helter-skelter smatters nearby a gingerly crooked elbow. A few of the deeper dents were still leaking a white-pink discharge, and the soldier's entire forearm had a marshmallowy cast to it like that of a pus-filled blister. Expressionless, Haruka pressed a placid thumb to a swath of taut, unmarked skin. The simple touch left behind a blazing red fingerprint.

"It hit me," said Makoto, "and it hurt, sure, but I could still use the arm." She hooked the bandages back into place and tightened them, her movements measured, slow. Beads of sweat stood out on her brow. "About thirty seconds after the impact, my whole side felt like it was on fire, and the metal bits, they—I don't know, Haruka, they were _digging into me_, and I screamed for a medic and let him pick them out while I roasted the attacking front with my other hand." She chuckled. "As close as he was to all that lightning, seems like the poor guy's gonna have a mohawk for months…"

She stopped. She synched the bandages, replaced the clip, and looked across the bow of her arms to Haruka. "Digging," she repeated. "Digging in deep. As much as they could—that's what it seemed like they were doing. Therefore," she stressed, "I'm gonna call them alive."

_Things crawling in the dark_, Haruka remembered. Allowing the smallest frown to curl her lips, she flicked a wary glance to the special mirror resting, facedown now, on the surface of the vanity. She wanted Michiru: near, for comfort. To look in the mirror too, just to be sure.

The misgivings gnawing around the rind of her belly suddenly had nothing to do with the night's party.

"Haruka?" Makoto ventured.

"We should call this whole thing off," opined the elder soldier quietly, "and mount a full investigation on Ceres. All of us. Right now. Michiru doesn't usually miss anything, and the fact that she didn't—maybe _couldn't_—pick this up has me concerned."

"Hey, you don't have to tell _me _how serious this is," Makoto reminded the other soldier. "I was there. I saw and felt what those weapons can do. And the fringe group itself—"

"Hey, _yeah_," Haruka realized. "What was the rationale behind the firefight, anyway? And the weapons stockpile? Did any of the insurgents say anything? …were they insurgents?"

Makoto shrugged helplessly—grimly. "Nothing was said."

"Don't tell me you wiped out _everyone_—"

"I didn't," the brunette insisted immediately, "wipe out _anyone_. I fried a few to the point of near stupidity, sure, and I'm pretty sure one guy was screaming something about his balls sizzling off, but I made sure no one was dead by my hand. I'm not a moron," she tacked on, and the look she gave Haruka was chiding. "I knew Minako would want to talk to them, and Ami too. She was a half day's journey behind us. Ami, I mean. We were going to keep them all for questioning."

"So why didn't you?" Haruka asked.

Makoto looked away. "Ten of them all told," she said. "Mixed blood, the lot. No real ties we could trace by ancestry, at least not by looks—Ami's been working on putting together other possible connections between them." She finished, "They shot themselves and they shot each other, and the one nearest to me—the one whose weapon gave me this?" She gestured to her arm. "He said to me before I could stun him, 'She doesn't tolerate failure,' and he looked at me and smiled, this faint little _weak _kind of smile, and he stuck that weird muzzle under his chin and—"

Her mouth twisted: in disgust, in horror.

"I've seen people die," she murmured. "I've seen them sorry about it, too. But I've never seen someone so confused as to the reason."

Haruka waited a few seconds, digesting this. She reached over next to touch two fingers to the border of Makoto's bandages. "Full investigation," she repeated. "All of us. This reeks of something bigger than we all know, and I don't like it."

"We'll start it tomorrow," agreed Minako from the door. Haruka and Makoto looked up as one, startled, and their friend twiddled her fingers at them and smirked. "I thought I'd ask permission to come in this time." She admitted, "Michiru suggested it."

"It's _her _roo—_tomorrow_? We don't need to wait until _tomorrow_," Haruka refused. "This should start as soon as possible." She squared her shoulders in a manner she felt was imposing. She pressed, "I want to know too why you didn't communicate the distress to us as it was occurring, Minako." She lifted her lips away from her teeth in an exasperated half-snarl. "This is more serious than I thought," she contended, "and your inaction is irresponsible at best."

Minako pouted—but there was a hardness in her face suddenly, something like garden stonework. She leaned against the doorjamb, feigning nonchalance. Out of the corner of her eye Haruka saw Makoto stiffen, and Minako challenged the taller blonde quietly, "What kind of tone is that you're thinking to take with me?"

"Hey, are they fighting?" Haruka vaguely heard someone in the hall inquire. "If they are, I want a front-row seat."

Haruka clenched her jaw so hard it hurt. She closed her eyes. She inhaled—counted to four. "Sorry," she growled, and distant parts of her, perhaps the ones at the poles of her being, meant it. "But why—"

"Communications went out approximately four seconds into the stop-in," Minako provided. "We hit dead space. And then, surprise! We hit _missiles_! They crippled my broadcaster. Can't send transmissions without a broadcaster, Haruka."

"Let's not even talk about how _my _antennae look right now," Makoto agreed, coming to Minako's defense. She winced. "My poor ship."

Haruka muttered again, "Sorry." It came out a little more sincere this time. Noting the change, Minako smiled—sheepishly, smugly—and relaxed, drifting back into the chamber with three other individuals in tow. Haruka was glad to see her partner among them.

"Aw," one of the other two sighed, "you're _not _fighting. I was hoping to see you throw Minako across the room, Haruka, because I want to quite _desperately _myself and I would, oh I _would_, you wretched little cretin"—and the girl, who was raven-haired and severe-looking and exquisite of face and figure all at once—"if I had any hope of lifting you, Minako, without snapping one of these heels!"

The fire soldier, Rei of commonspeak and Mars when she wore the uniform, made strangling motions at the grinning blonde.

"Are you trying to say I'm fat?" wondered Minako.

"You. Stole. My. Best. _Dress_," seethed Rei, punctuating every word with a clackity step in Minako's direction. Her nails closed on air, squeezed an invisible throat. "Whatever you are, it's about to not matter because I'm going to kill you and then you'll be _dead _and—"

"Pearl looks better on you," Minako insisted softly. "It brings out your eyes."

"I'll bring out your eyes too," Rei offered. "Come into my room uninvited while I'm bathing, will you? I'll _boil them out_, you—"

"It really does look lovely on you, Rei," Michiru opined. Cutting deftly between the two younger soldiers, she slipped to Haruka's side and stood there pointedly, a quill put home to its parchment. She told her partner, "As much as we'd all like to move on this now, there's no possibility of starting the trip tonight." Her hand found Haruka's shoulder, cupped it—slid down the arm below too. Haruka slanted her eyes and tipped slightly to the touch, lips curving in a grateful smile that was just as oblivious as it was sincere. The others in the room saw it, sent it back, and Michiru assured her, "Ami's already checked."

Haruka shifted her gaze to the quietest member of their convention. She arched her brows, expectant.

Ami took the gesture as permission to speak. "Ceres is located in the scatter-belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and that's a problem," she said. She stopped. Holding up a finger pale as a snowflake, she proceeded over to the bedroom door and pressed it closed. She locked it too—then frowned and admitted, "I'm not sure why I did that."

She sighed. She shook her head, cobalt hair aglow in the light from the lamp on the bureau, and continued, "The asteroid belt is a volatile and extremely unstable environment. Individual asteroids often impact each other and shift into new orbits—sometimes they hit Ceres too." She opened her hands—graceful things, Haruka noted idly, a little like Michiru's but smaller, sharper—and splayed them. "I used data from Minako and Makoto's ships' most recent nav-maps to document the asteroids currently closest to Ceres. I plotted their orbits over the next month and half, factoring in such variables as collisions, impacts, and the intrusion of main-belt comets."

She took a breath. She concluded, "In several mapped scenarios, the asteroids near Ceres always clustered too close to the dwarf's atmosphere to allow for the safe reentry of even the smallest ship. In short, we have no hope of getting back there right now without being smashed into powder."

Haruka frowned. "How many is _several_ scenarios, exactly?"

"Exactly?" Ami echoed.

"Yes."

The younger woman's eyes hazed. She postulated, "Give or take a rogue diagnostic, eight trillion and—"

Haruka held up her hands, palms out. "Right, okay, good enough for me. Thank you, Ami." Dropping her arms resignedly back into her lap, she inquired next, "What's your best guess as to when the path for reentry will be clear again?"

"At best," hedged Ami, "a week and a half. At worst, three weeks. I intend to closely monitor their progress by bouncing signals to them from satellites on Jupiter's moons—but Michiru's right. There's nothing to be done now besides planning, and…" She hesitated. She finished, not without guilt, "…we have a little while, and…"

"What Ami means," Michiru rescued the floundering, soft-spoken soldier, "is that fretting over this now is unnecessary, since we're all here, and safe, and we have the better part of a week to plot our next course of action—and if there's still an enemy faction on Ceres, they're stuck there." Leaving Haruka's side, the hosting princess stepped to Ami and draped her arm gently about the smaller woman's shoulders. She gave them a light squeeze. "We should just enjoy the party. Right?"

Ami nodded. Feathering her fingers together, she gifted Haruka a shy smile and admitted, "You look very nice, Haruka. And," she blustered on, looking to Michiru for permission, "I—I was hoping you'd dance with me. Once!" she nearly yelped. "Just once," she repeated, more muted this time. "I've heard it's an experience one simply can't miss"—Michiru grinned, clearly the one responsible for spreading that particular rumor—"and I've been encouraged by my court to educate myself as thoroughly as possible in the cultural practices of my peers."

Haruka thought privately that certain other individuals in the room would have preferred the invitation. She agreed anyway, pumping one eyebrow high on her forehead, "Oh, I'll rock your world."

Ami blinked, puzzled. "It's quite rocky already," she relayed. Utilizing what Haruka assumed was a lifetime of experience and near saintly patience, Ami ignored Minako's giggles and the sound of Rei's forehead hitting an open palm.

"It's an express… uh. You know, never mind." Haruka didn't fancy attempting to defibrillate humor into a quip already stone-cold dead. "Yes, I'll dance with you. Once." She rubbed her jaw thoughtfully. "Although I've seen Mercurial dances before, and I have to say mine aren't quite so different. Despite what some people," and she smirked at Michiru, "might say." She proposed, "You might try a Jovian battle jig. If," she put in, "you're looking for diversity, I mean."

"Really?" Beaming, Ami turned to the room's second-tallest member, who flushed quite prettily and worried her swollen fingers over minute wrinkles in Michiru's comforter. "Makoto, I know you'll dance with me—you're always kind enough to try. Will you show me a battle jig?"

Makoto grinned, executed a small bow whilst still sitting down. Her face was pink as fresh roses and while everyone—perhaps even Ami—noticed it, no one was cruel enough to parlay comment. "If milady wishes, milady gets," replied the lightning soldier. She added, "It's my pleasure."

"All the more reason to get to the party sooner, right?" interjected Minako. She worried her elbow against Ami's. "You don't want to keep your dance partner waiting." Leaning around Michiru, the blonde spread her arms in a grand flourish, gave Haruka a look verging on predatory, and purred, "Let's do this thing, shall we?"

Haruka admitted, "I'd like to know what that _thing _is, please."

The visiting soldiers exchanged meaningful glances.

"That's not a good idea," Ami professed.

"Hold her down," Minako suggested.

One strong hand folded over Haruka's shoulder in the next instant. Wearing an expression of simmering curiosity, Makoto said, "I have no idea what they're going to do, but I _really _want to see them try to make you pretty." She apologized, an afterthought: "Sorry."

Haruka provided no protest. She slanted petulant eyes at Michiru, who came to brace her other shoulder. "Is this really necessary?"

"Not at all," Michiru returned. "It's more fun this way, though." Tweaking the fine hairs along the nape of Haruka's neck, the hosting princess flicked her eyes to another of the room's soldiers and nudged, "Rei, you asked for my sewing kit? It's in that first drawer there—yes. Take what you need."

Defensive instinct stirred in Haruka's gut, lent steel to her spine. "Hey now," she dissented, "wait just a second—"

"Ami, you first," Minako took over. She sounded nothing short of devilishly gleeful. "Michiru, you might want to cover Haruka's eyes first. We're never going to get close to her otherwise."

"Cover my _eyes_? What in the _hell _are you—"

To Haruka's shock, Michiru's palm furled over the bridge of her nose. Shutters of faint light fell through the slight gaps in her partner's fingers. "Sssh," Michiru encouraged. The hand on Haruka's neck quested upward—a firm thumb found the scar on her skull, caressed it. As Haruka suppressed a groan, Michiru whispered to her softly, "Be good, love."

A sudden delicate pinch and coldness: on her left earlobe, of all places. Haruka shivered and frowned as the lobe went numb. She smelled snow, the low whisper of a winter breeze. Ami suggested a moment later, "That should be enough. Rei, your turn."

"Angle her head up a bit," the fire soldier replied.

Fingers slid beneath her chin and lifted it aright. Minako, presumably the owner of those fingers, insisted, "This is going to look fabulous."

Makoto, who now saw her companions' intention, contributed in a delighted half-laugh, "Damn! _Really_? That's the plan? That's—"

An abrupt, barely-there prick of heat touched Haruka's ear, left it again. "There," Rei said smugly. "How's that?"

"Proportionate." Ami sounded pleased. "Good job."

"Perfect." Minako this time. "What do you think, Makoto?"

"I think Michiru should finish it," decided the soldier, rubbing her thumb along Haruka's shoulder excitedly. "It's only fitting. It's hers, isn't it?"

Haruka's ear was beginning to sting a bit. She growled, "Get on with it."

"Listen to you, you big grouch," Michiru scolded her fondly. "Keep your eyes closed just a minute more, all right?"

Muttering her assent, the blonde heaved a sigh. Michiru's hands shifted away. "May I have it, Minako?" she requested. There came a faint metallic clinking sound, followed by Michiru's murmured thanks.

Finally: a tug on Haruka's earlobe. A click. Michiru's breath tickled the side of her throat and Haruka didn't have to see her partner's face to know she was smiling.

"Look," Michiru said.

Haruka looked.

Six faces in the mirror now: five beaming and expectant, one—Haruka's own—bemused. All colors of the spectrum gleaming there, gowns and gazes and grins: a new golden hoop in her ear too. She stared at it. Reached up ginger fingertips to brush it. The metal was cool and crisp against her flesh, and its spearmint touch reminded her of Michiru's kiss.

"Do you like it?" her lover inquired. Makoto slipped intuitively aside and Michiru's hands came to rest, the pair of them, on Haruka's shoulders.

Haruka shook her head to test the weight of the hoop. It made no noise or nuisance, and she found herself instantly appreciative of the sinister wink it provided half her countenance. She could only think to say, though, "You won't miss it?"

"Not if it's with you," Michiru disagreed. She teased, "Tolerable, then?"

"I guess," Haruka pretended to grouse.

Minako threw up her hands and stomped away. "Some people just don't know how to be _grateful_," she moaned. "My idea. Mine! A dish of pure _fabulous _and you greet it with an _I guess_, sheesh." And then, insistent, "You're _welcome_, Haruka."

"You know," Haruka mused, slanting her squall-eyes at the other blonde in the mirror, "I _could _learn to consider this gross disfigurement. And I think you're aware of just how my people repay such crimes, Minako. Eye for an eye. Idea for idea. Pierced ear for"—and the soldier drew from an unseen scabbard a jeweled sword of legend, its burnished blade ablaze—"pierced ear."

She braced the sword's hilt on her knee and canted it sideways a little, such that its reflective glitter played over Minako's throat and skipped up her jawline. Idly, Haruka polished away a rogue fingerprint from the weapon's beveled grip.

Minako laughed—but it was a _quick _laugh. She admitted, "I can never tell if you're joking or not."

"Best not test it," Makoto advised. Taking Haruka's lack of response as a signal, the tallest of the visiting soldiers ushered her peers together. "We'll see you at the gala!" She wiggled her hips for the second time in so many minutes, bumping Rei—who eyed her in surprise—and a flushed Ami, who giggled softly. As the group of girls unlocked the door and trickled into the hall beyond, Haruka heard the shy water soldier ask Makoto if such gyrations were also common in battle jigs.

"Thank you for the help, ladies!" Michiru called after them. She left Haruka temporarily to trail the younger women—though only to the door. Once there, she nudged it back into place, locked it, and turned to face her partner again. An impish smile decorated her lips.

Sheathing the sword, Haruka stood and crooked a finger at the smaller princess.

Michiru noted the behest and approached. When she was near enough to seize, Haruka looped her arms about the other woman. The distance between them fell to nothing and they swayed a bit, Michiru's chin on Haruka's collar, Haruka's eyes on Michiru alone.

"So, what do you think?" Haruka asked finally. "Am I pretty now?"

Michiru rocked onto her toes and answered in a kiss. Haruka parried with another. They fought, a war of mouths and wandering hands: Michiru, parting a dress zipper, raked her nails down Haruka's spine. Haruka's teeth sang punishingly over Michiru's lower lip. The smaller princess laughed into Haruka's cheek and the blonde growled, affection coloring the sound calm.

"The next time you want to stick something in me," Haruka warned, "you'd better ask first." She tacked on, "Don't invite anyone else either."

"_Haruka_!" Michiru's yelp was scandalized—delighted too. She pursued, "You do like it, don't you?"

"I can deal with it," the taller woman allowed grudgingly.

Michiru swatted her hip and drew back a bit. "You _like _it. And you should. It makes you look savage."

Haruka perked. "Does it really?"

"It does." Stepping around her partner, Michiru surveyed her fellow soldier from varying angles. She smoothed the odd wrinkle: re-zipped Haruka's dress yet again. She hid a smug smile behind her fingers and professed at last, "You're _resplendent _in your ferocity."

She looked at Haruka expectantly. When the other woman afforded her only a blank blink, Michiru pressed, gentle, "It's your turn to give me a compliment."

Haruka grinned—shrugged. As her indignant lover began to bristle, Haruka put in, "No words of mine could begin to describe you now, Michiru. They fall short even here." She tapped her temple.

With a faint huff and a fluster, Michiru congratulated Haruka, "Nice save."

"I try." Haruka made a little bow. Since she was nearby she also, after evaluating it, took a sampling taste of Michiru's throat.

"No—_no_. Stop it," Michiru giggled breathlessly into her temple. "Seriously, I'm going to—_Haruka_, I will _pinch you_, I swear I—"

"I like pinching," Haruka informed Michiru, and suckled a spot of satin skin just above the woman's collar.

Michiru's hands found her cheeks, cupped them, and gave them a pointed squeeze. "Take that, then," she scolded. She smirked and stepped from Haruka, slender form all sassy sashay. "We need to go downstairs now, you irrepressible beast." At the taller soldier's doomed expression and pleading glance, Michiru sighed, "Oh, don't look at me that way, Haruka. _Please_."

Haruka frowned. "Like _what_?"

"Like a dying _puppy_," Michiru admonished. "Like the world is going to end."

"It—it _might_!" Haruka defended. "You can't possibly think going to the gala is a good idea after what Minako told us. And Makoto's arm too—"

"I," Michiru opposed, "happen to think it's a _wonderful _idea."

Haruka stared at the other woman. After a startled pause, she reached over and palmed a buttock through Michiru's gown. She gave it a thoughtful squeeze.

Michiru jerked. Haruka's handful flexed, a round of tight sin. "What are you _doing_?"

"Checking to see if it's actually you. Because what you just said sounds absolutely _lunatic_, and the real Michiru would—"

"—beat her dear, darling lover senseless if that lover were to wrinkle her dress," Michiru confessed sweetly. "This took _forever _to press, Haruka."

"Forget about the dress," Haruka sighed. She fixed her cohort with a disapproving gaze and went on, "Dresses and dancing and… and… _really_, Michiru? Two of them nearly got killed coming here and you—you're…"

"…more articulate than you?" Michiru offered. She smirked.

Sudden irritation—rare when Michiru was involved—wrinkled Haruka's mouth into a small snarl. She snapped, derisive, "You've got to be _stupid _to want to go on with the gala."

Michiru blinked at her lover. Her smirk disappeared—she arched her brows. She turned away in a quiet click of heels, and Haruka saw hurt creep over her pale features in the vanity's mirror. Closing her eyes, Michiru took a breath, let it out again between pursed lips, and waited.

Haruka was ashamed.

"Do you feel better?" Michiru ventured a few seconds later. "Is there anything else?"

"…n… no."

"Are you sure? Because I can take it, you know, and I'm willing to take it if you're willing to throw it—"

"_No_." Haruka's cheeks felt hot and _were _hot. "Listen, I'm sorry, I'm just—"

"Scared." Michiru opened her eyes again. She twisted to look at Haruka properly: full in the face rather than in the mirror. She took a hedging step back toward her best friend. "Scared," she repeated. "Like they are. Like I am." The request on her face was both muted and unmistakable.

The heat in Haruka's cheeks dropped into her chest—fanned there, fired there, a low kindle of bristling wonder. She opened her arms, crooking the fingertips at the ends of them. Michiru stepped into the semicircle and Haruka closed it, knitting the smaller princess near. As a cheek came to rest in the hollow above her breastbone, the blonde asked, "You're scared?"

Michiru furled her fingers in Haruka's elbow. She nestled a fraction closer. Haruka inhaled and smelled summer seafoam. "Just now," Michiru said, "right here? No. No, I'm not."

Haruka tightened her grip a little. She enjoined, "Don't be scared." She peered down at Michiru through her lashes. "Even when you're not—you know. Right here. I'll still protect you."

Michiru laughed, muffled, into Haruka's flesh and the dress fabric too.

The taller woman scowled. "Hey, I'm trying to be sensitive and sexy here—"

"It's _working_, it's working," Michiru assured her. She lifted a hand. Its fingers rasped Haruka's lips—crept up, one at a time, over cheek and jaw and temple. They found the new earring. Michiru tweaked it.

"That's still tender," Haruka protested, even though it wasn't.

Michiru hmm'd. She lowered the hand between them and furled it over Haruka's breast instead, rubbing her thumb over the prize through cloth. Haruka slanted her eyes and tried to think of something witty to say to the action. She came up short.

"Is this tender too?" Michiru asked. She smiled, so sweet and soft and Haruka's breath stole away in a shuddery sigh and—

Michiru pinched.

Haruka yipped. She jerked away, massaging the offended spot. Her partner kept smiling—an expression that, while loving, was not without malice—and reprimanded Haruka, "Don't call me stupid again."

The blonde provided the other soldier a resigned salute. "Heard and understood."

Michiru glanced at herself in the vanity mirror. She smoothed a rogue wisp of a curl behind a shell-fanned ear and revisited, ginger, "We're all scared—but not badly. Not yet."

Haruka nodded. What Michiru said was true.

"Let's keep it so," suggested the marine-haired soldier. "It's our responsibility to anchor and protect the rest—to put on a brave face for them. If we treat the situation calmly, especially given that there's nothing to be done about it right now, there's an excellent chance they'll treat it calmly too." Shifting a hairpin, Michiru pursued, "If we're going to have to fight soon, it's best to try to go into it composed. We'll make better decisions that way. Yes?"

"Yes," sighed Haruka. She stepped to Michiru. She carefully smoothed the smaller woman's curls. Leaning down a bit, she requested, "Speaking of composed… will you humor me and check your mirror? Just once more?" She added, "It will make me feel better."

Michiru smiled again. She reached for the handle of the ancient talisman—touched it.

The citadel's gong sounded next, sending a heavy _whmmm _throughout the palace. The floor shook faintly—dust sifted from between cracks in the flagstone walls, and the ceremonial torches in the halls guttered and cast shivering orange shadows down staircases.

Michiru shook her head. She drew her hand from the mirror—twined her fingers in Haruka's instead and squeezed them. "That's our cue," she sighed. "We mustn't be late."

"But—"

"After," Michiru coaxed Haruka, "we'll come back here. I'll have a nice, long look in the mirror. And then"—her thumb traced Haruka's wrist, signing promises on skin—"you and I… we'll have a nice, long…"

She paused. She nibbled her lips and looked at Haruka over her shoulder. "Hm," she remembered. "You mentioned something earlier—right? A few things you wanted to show me?"

"Surprises," Haruka acknowledged. She cupped her free hand over Michiru's shoulder. Her palm engulfed the pale curve.

"Yes, that's right. Surprises…" Michiru rose. Stepping around the vanity bench, she arched onto her toes, ghosted her lips over Haruka's, and invited, "Later, love—please. Do surprise me."

She slipped from the blonde's grasp and walked to the door. Opening it, she motioned for Haruka to join her.

Haruka did. She hooked her arm through Michiru's and stood with her for a moment at the threshold of the bedroom, surveying the empty hallway beyond. She took a deep breath. She muttered, "No chance of me getting out of this, right?"

"Not even remotely," Michiru agreed, solemn.

"Let's go, then." Haruka swept into the hall—or tried. She stumbled in her short heels. Michiru nudged beneath her flailing arm to steady her.

"Perhaps it's best if I lead," suggested the hosting princess.

She drew Haruka down the hall. A few paces made together gave Haruka the rhythm she needed, and as they reached the staircase and began their descent, the taller of the pair said, "Michiru?"

"Mmhm?"

"About tonight. About later…"

They looked at each other. Michiru flushed. Haruka did too—and grinned. "I will," she guaranteed. "Surprise you, I mean."

"I don't doubt it," Michiru replied, drawing Haruka's elbow possessively closer, "for an instant."

They disappeared around the curve of the staircase and their shadows followed them.

In their wake, a faint glow sparked in Michiru's empty bedchamber. The talisman on the vanity shimmered sickly. A thread of darkness crawled over its surface.


End file.
